Customer Reviews

The Making of Americans (American Literature Series)

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It is a shame that so much of Gertrude Stein's work is dismissed because of its unconventionality. Though sometimes difficult to read, Stein's writing has a lyrical quality about it unparalleled by the work of other writers. The Making of Americans is probably one of her best, and well worth the effort it might take to read it. I found that after only a few pages, I was moved along by the rhythm and cadence that carries the story. A wonderful read!

What starts of as an anecdotal recounting of what I imagine is Stein's forefathers and foremothers immigrant experience launches off into a brilliant, highly intellectual examination and rhapsody of individuality and conformity among other things (like death and consciousness and the battle between the sexes). This book will literally change the way you think you think. I think it should.

Gertrude Stein opens this mammoth work with the statement that she writes for herself and strangers. It's one thing to read about this work, whether by Stein herself or by her critics; it's quite another thing to read it for yourself. You really have to read the whole thing in order to believe anyone could or would ever write or want to write such a mammoth, monstrous yet curious work.

The hallmark of Stein's originality essentially is strangeness. This work is a quasi-historical, quasi-sociological and quasi-psychological epic whose rhythmic sentence structures have a chant-like tribal feeling, nearly hypnotizing in its relentless rolling forward.

Janet Malcolm, a wonderful journalist, cut the book in half with a knife in order to be able to manage the physical difficulties of reading this book. Not a masterpiece, this is just of one literature's strangest zoological specimens.