 First edition title page | |
| Author | Gertrude Stein |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
Publication date | 1925 |
| Media type | |
The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress is a modernist novel by Gertrude Stein. The novel traces the genealogy, history, and psychological development of members of the fictional Hersland and Dehning families. Stein also includes frequent metafictional meditations on the process of writing the text that periodically overtake the main narrative.
Stein wrote the bulk of the novel between 1903 and 1911, and evidence from her manuscripts suggests three major periods of revision during that time. [1] The manuscript remained mostly hidden from public view until 1924 when, at the urging of Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford agreed to publish excerpts in the transatlantic review . [2] In 1925, the Paris-based Contact Press published a limited run of the novel consisting of 500 copies. A much-abridged edition was published by Harcourt Brace in 1934, but the full version remained out of print until Something Else Press republished it in 1966. In 1995, a new, definitive edition was published by Dalkey Archive Press with a foreword by William Gass. [3]
Stein writes, "the important matter in the history of the Dehning family is the marrying of Julia" [4] to Alfred Hersland, and Stein describes the members of each of their families - as well as several peripheral characters with whom the families are acquainted - in insistent, painstaking detail. The book lacks chapter divisions, but it is roughly divided into sections corresponding to the lives of one generation of Herslands: Alfred, his wife Julia (née Dehning), and his siblings, Martha and David.
Stein employs a limited vocabulary and relies heavily on the technique of repetition. Her unusual use of the present participle is one of the most commonly noted features of the text. [5] [6]
The book contains many autobiographical elements. Some scholars argue that David Hersland is a fictional representation of Gertrude Stein's brother Leo. [7] Gossols, the Western city that the Hersland family calls home, is said to be a stand-in for the Steins' hometown of Oakland, California. [8]
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.
Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion".
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. He gained fame as a writer, and notoriety as well, for his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. In his later years, he took up photography and took many portraits of notable people. Although he was married to women for most of his adult years, Van Vechten engaged in numerous homosexual affairs over his lifetime.
Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American writer, poet, and publisher. In the 1920s, he founded in Paris the publishing house, Contact Editions, where he published Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.
James Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishing.
Julia Alvarez is an American New Formalist poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and Yo! (1997). Her publications as a poet include Homecoming (1984) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004), and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare (1998). She has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale and many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant contemporary Latina writers.
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton was an American writer. Many of her novels are set in her home state of California. Her bestselling novel Black Oxen (1923) was made into a silent movie of the same name. In addition to novels, she wrote short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on such issues as feminism, politics, and war.
Felipe Alfau was a Spanish-born American novelist and poet. Most of his works were written in English.
Dalkey Archive Press is an American publisher of fiction, poetry, foreign translations and literary criticism specializing in the publication or republication of lesser-known, often avant-garde works. The company has offices in Funks Grove, Illinois, in Dublin, and in London. The publisher is named for the novel The Dalkey Archive, by the Irish author Flann O'Brien. It is owned by nonprofit publisher Deep Vellum.
Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera composed in 1928 by Virgil Thomson, setting a libretto written in 1927 by Gertrude Stein. It contains about 20 saints and is in at least four acts. It was groundbreaking in form, content, and for its all-black cast, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral director, and supported by her choir.
Robert Myron Coates was an American novelist, short story writer and art critic. He published five novels; one classic historical work, The Outlaw Years (1930) which deals with the history of the land pirates of the Natchez Trace; a book of memoirs, The View from Here (1960), and two travel books, Beyond the Alps (1962) and South of Rome (1965). During his unusually varied career, Coates explored many different genres and styles of writing and produced three highly remarkable experimental novels, The Eater of Darkness (1926), Yesterday’s Burdens (1933) and The Bitter Season (1946). Highly original and experimental, these novels draw upon expressionism, Dadaism and surrealism. His last two novels—Wisteria Cottage (1948) and The Farther Shore (1955)—are examples of crime fiction. Simultaneously to working as a novelist, Coates maintained a life-long career at the New Yorker, whose staff he joined in 1927. The magazine printed more than a hundred of his short stories many of which were collected in three anthologies; All the Year Round (1943), The Hour after Westerly (1957) and The Man Just ahead of You (1964). Also, from 1937 to 1967, Coates was the New Yorker’s art critic and coined the term “abstract expressionism” in 1946 in reference to the works of Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and others. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1958. Coates was married to sculptor Elsa Kirpal from 1927 to 1946. Their first and only child, Anthony Robertson Coates, was born on March 4, 1934. In 1946, they divorced and Coates married short story writer Astrid Meighan-Peters. He died of cancer of the throat in New York City on February 8, 1973.
Margaret Caroline Anderson was the American founder, editor and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review, which published a collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. The periodical is most noted for introducing many prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, in the United States and publishing the first thirteen chapters of James Joyce's then-unpublished novel Ulysses.
Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, diarist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist. He published more than a dozen collections of poetry, exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, edited the Surrealist magazine View (1940–1947) in New York City, and directed an experimental film. He was the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew.
Modernist literature originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
Three Lives (1909) is a work of fiction written in 1905 and 1906 by American writer Gertrude Stein. The book is separated into three stories, "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "The Gentle Lena."
Mary A. Bookstaver (1875–1950) was a feminist, political activist, and editor, widely known by the nickname "May." Daughter of Judge Henry W. Bookstaver and Mary Baily Young, she attended Miss Florence Baldwin's School and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1898 in history and political science. After graduation she moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she was part of a circle of lesbian Bryn Mawr graduates, including Bookstaver's lover, Mabel Haynes. Gertrude Stein, then a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine student, became infatuated with Bookstaver, who found Stein's naïveté literally laughable, but introduced Stein to physical love. The experience made a deep impression on Stein, whose first novel, QED, completed in Baltimore in 1903, was an autobiographical account of this love triangle, with Bookstaver's character named "Helen Thomas."
Steven Moore is an American author and literary critic. Best known as the primary authority on the novelist William Gaddis, he is the author of the two-volume study The Novel: An Alternative History.
Ida A Novel is a novel by Gertrude Stein, first published in 1941.
Ryder (1928) is the first novel by Djuna Barnes. A composite of different literary styles, from lyrical poetry to sentimental fiction, it is an example of a modernist novel in the Rabelaisian tradition of bawdy and parodic fiction. Nearly every chapter is written in a different style. The novel is thought to draw on elements of Barnes's own life.
Writers in Paris in the 1920s refer to the American expatriate writers in Paris in the 1920s. They created literary works and movements that influence the global literary landscape to date. During the 1920s, political, economic, and social issues shaped the inspiration behind many of the writers in Paris. The American writers in Paris in the 1920s are referred to as the Lost Generation.
The Making of Americans public domain audiobook at LibriVox