Gertrude Stein Making Of Americans

Gertrude Stein Making Of Americans

Most people who try to read Gertrude Stein's Making Of Americans quit within the first fifty pages. That is not a recommendation, just an observation I have made repeatedly in seminars, book clubs, and my own early attempts. The book is approximately 700,000 words long, was written between 1906 and 1911, and was not published until 1925, three years after her death. It follows eight American families across multiple generations using a prose style that refuses to distinguish between description, dialogue, and internal thought in any conventional way. The standard criticism is that Stein writes sentences like "when they were very good and when they were very bad and when they were not quite so very good and not quite so very bad there were a number of times that they were very, very good." Critics take this as evidence of pretension or empty formalism. The actual technique is much more deliberate. Stein is attempting to capture what she called the continuous present - the experience of living through time moment by moment rather than narrating it retrospectively. She is not failing at realism. She is attempting a different kind of realism. I remember wrestling with the opening chapter during a graduate seminar. I had highlighted nearly every sentence in three different colors trying to track which family was being described and when the temporal frame shifted. My professor told me to stop. He said I was approaching the text the same way you would approach a telephone directory - looking for data instead of experiencing the rhythm. That was frustrating to hear but accurate. The book demands you slow down your reading speed considerably and let the repetition do its work. When I stopped trying to extract information and just read the sounds of the sentences out loud, the structure became visible.

How The Book Actually Works

The Making Of Americans is organized around what Stein called "types." Each chapter focuses on a particular family and attempts to describe the essential nature of its members - their nationalities, occupations, moral characters, and psychological dispositions. The repetition is structural, not decorative. Stein returns to the same facts about each character repeatedly, each time shifting the emphasis slightly, building up a cumulative portrait the way a portrait artist layers paint. The famous opening sentence about ab Elbert Berth Aline Behr repeats variations on the same family information throughout the entire first section. The book has three main parts. The first covers the earlier generations of the families. The second section focuses on Rose Adelberd Austere. The third part returns to the broader family histories. There is no plotted narrative arc in the traditional sense. What drives the book forward is Stein's interest in the question of national character - what makes someone fundamentally American versus fundamentally European in temperament and outlook.

Common Approaches To Reading It

Reading straight through is possible but demanding. A more practical method I have used successfully is to pick one family section and work through it slowly, perhaps 15 to 20 pages per sitting. The prose rewards close attention but breaks down under speed reading. If you skim, you will genuinely miss everything the book is doing. Another approach some readers find useful is reading aloud. The rhythmic quality of the prose becomes much clearer when you hear it. The grammar is deliberately simplified and repetitive in ways that only register fully through vocalization. I found this particularly helpful when I was stuck on Chapter 17, where Stein describes Martin Anderson Neville's childhood. The passage repeats almost the same sequence of events from slightly different angles, and reading it silently I was losing the thread. Speaking it out loud made the pattern obvious within seconds.

Where Beginners Go Wrong

The biggest mistake is expecting characters to develop psychologically in the conventional novelistic sense. They do not. Stein is not interested in character growth or transformation. She is interested in character essence - the fixed, unchanging core of who someone is. This frustrates readers trained on the realist tradition from Dickens to Baldwin. The secondary mistake is assuming the prose is random or automatic. Every repetition is carefully placed. Stein spent five years on this book and revised extensively. A third pitfall is bringing expectations about plot or conflict. There is minimal narrative action. Events happen, are described, and then the prose moves on. Relationships are noted but not dramatized in scene-by-scene fashion. If you want a story with rising tension and resolution, this is the wrong book. If you want to understand how one of the most influential modernist writers attempted to rebuild the novel from the ground up, this is essential reading.

Why It Matters In Literary History

The Gertrude Stein Making Of Americans influenced Pound, Hemingway, Williams, and countless modernist and postmodernist writers. Hemingway cited it as a major influence on his own stripped-down prose style, though he removed the repetition and kept the underlying compression. William Carlos Williams studied it closely for its approach to American speech patterns. The book's treatment of identity, nationality, and repetition anticipated later developments in structuralist and poststructuralist thought by decades. Proust reportedly told Stein that her book was the most important thing written in English since the nineteenth century. Whether or not that assessment holds up to scrutiny, it is remarkable that a writer based in Paris, working in an experimental mode that rejected virtually every convention of her time, produced a work that has continued to generate serious critical attention for over a century.

Practical Access

The text is in the public domain and available through Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, and various university digital library archives. The Norton Critical Edition includes substantial apparatus - essays, contextual documents, and critical responses - which is worth the purchase price if you are approaching the book seriously. The standalone text without commentary is free and adequate if you are confident in your own reading approach. The book remains difficult. It should remain difficult. It is not a casual read, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to what Stein was attempting. But the difficulty is not obfuscation. It is a genuine challenge that, if met with patience, reveals something about American identity, narrative form, and the possibilities of prose that most readers never encounter in conventional fiction.