Making of Americans

What if a novel about a family became an inquiry into what it means to be anyone at all? Gertrude Stein spent five years (1906-1911) writing this radical work, finally published in 1925, and the time shows. The Making of Americans is a family saga that dissolves into something stranger: an obsessive, repetitive, often hilarious attempt to catalog every variety of human being. Stein loves her subjects too much to describe them once. She returns to the same people, the same phrases, the same questions about identity and love and death, circling ever closer like a meditation or a spell. Sometimes she's certain she's grasped human nature; more often, she's not. The result is 900 pages of accumulation, grief, tenderness, and pure language play. This is Stein unfiltered, before she became the famous salon hostess, when she was still just a writer trying to prove something about consciousness itself.