Making of Americans

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was born in Pittsburgh to a prosperous German-Jewish family. She was educated in France and the United States, worked under the pioneering psychologist William James, and later studied medicine. With her brother Leo she was an important patron of the arts, acquiring works by many contemporary artists, most famously Picasso, while her home became a popular meeting place for writers and painters from Matisse to Hemingway. Her books include Three Lives, Tender Buttons, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.Steven Meyer is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (2001, Stanford UP) as well as half a dozen essays on Stein’s narrative practices. In 2018 he edited the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science and current works in progress include Robust Empiricisms: Jamesian Modernism between the Disciplines, 1878 to the Present. Material from Robust Empiricisms has appeared in numerous edited collections.William H. Gass (1924-2017) was an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He graduated from Kenyon College and received his PhD at Cornell University. He taught philosophy at both Purdue University and at Washington University in St. Louis where he was the David May Distinguished Professor of Humanities. In 1990, Gass founded the International Writers Center (now known as the Center for the Humanities) and served as its director until his retirement in 2000.

“The Making of Americans presents a no less radical challenge to the realist novel’s concept of character than Finnegans Wake, written twenty-eight years later; in this respect, it also predates the formal innovations of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy by over four decades.” —Bookforum“Indubitably the most monumental fiction to be given since the publication of Ulysses.” —Saturday Review of Literature“This sober, tender-hearted, very searching history of a family’s progress, comprehends in its picture of life which is distinctively American, a psychology which is universal.” —Marianne Moore, Dial“The Making of Americans is the first announcement of what would be Stein’s greatest legacy—to reclaim the world of the nineteenth-century woman from such weird, smutty interlopers as Flaubert and, later, Joyce, and transform it into the most exalted ground of human potentiality available to us... It is monumental, horribly flawed, and a joy to read if you just give up and drown in it.” —Matthew Stadler, The Stranger