Making of Americans, The [Morceaux Choisis de la Fabrication des Americains].
Stein, Gertrude. Morceaux Choisis De La Fabrication des Américains. Histoire du progrès d’une famille. Traduction et préface de Georges Hugnet. Portrait de l’auteur par Christian Bérard. Paris: Montagne, (1929).
Large 8vo.; frontispiece portrait of Stein; first signature opened, balance of leaves unopened; deckled edges; eggshell printed wrappers with flaps; glassine dust-jacket.
Second edition, deluxe issue; 302 copies, entire edition. Ten copies (numbered 6-15) were printed on Hollande van Gelder paper and signed on the colophon by Stein and the artist Christian Bérard; this is copy #12. The first edition printed in English, published by Harcourt Brace in 1934, was substantially pared down for American readers by Stein’s principal French translator, Bernard Fay. This edition, however, contains the full breadth of Stein’s inventive powers, though some critics believe the American edition to be more readable after Fay eliminated some of Stein’s redundancies and compositional tics in his redacted translation.
Written in 1908-09, but not published until 1925 due to a lack of commercial interest, The Making of Americans reflects Stein’s devotion to the practice of automatic writing. Her prose, which contains no dramatic action or dialogue, and very little punctuation, seeks to imitate the effect of Cubist art by simultaneously presenting objects and experiences from a number of different angles and perspectives. The saga of one family expands into a historical vision of all of humanity, with images of past, present, and future conflated into what Stein called “a continuous present.” In her review, literary critic Katherine Anne Porter wrote, “The people in this world appear to be motionless at every stage of their progress, each one is simultaneously being born, arriving at all ages and dying. You perceive that it is a world without mobility, everything takes place, has taken place, will take place; therefore nothing takes place, all at once.” Stein’s methodology of divorcing words from their meanings ironically leads to a new system of signification, a sort of “literary plasticity” that transforms language into a less temporal and more abstract medium of expression. Reading Stein, according to writer Vernon Loggins, is the closest one can come to experiencing “thought in the nude.” Stein continued perfecting this style in later writings, but The Making of Americans is considered to be the most definitive example of her groundbreaking linguistic technique and continues to startle and fascinate contemporary readers and scholars.
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