The Making of Americans - Being a History of a Family's Progress (American Literature)

"Essential for all literature collections . . . Several of Stein's titles returned to print in 1995, but none more important than The Making of Americans."—Library Journal

In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

Gertrude Stein, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, is a renowned American writer, poet, and art collector. The author of more than a dozen books and countless works of criticism, Stein died in France in 1946.

William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He has been the recipient of the first PEN/Nabokov Award, the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay, three National Book Critic Circle Awards for Criticism, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in St. Louis.