Making of Americans, The.
Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans. The Hersland Family. Preface by Bernard Fay. New York: Albert & Charles Boniy, (1926).
8vo.; faun cloth, stamped in brown; red and black dust-jacket; a superb example.
First edition printed and published and in the United States. Wilson A6d. A 1926 miniscule issue, approximately 100 copies, was done up by Boni for the American market from sheets of the 1925 Paris edition; that is a rare book of which we’ve seen only a single copy in twenty-five years. Though no press figures are recorded, it was issued on the heels of the successful Harcourt edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, of which 5400 copies were printed.
Stein’s most enduring work, perceived by critics to be the high water mark of her experimental style. Though Bernard Fay, Stein’s principle French translator of the period, redacted the text of the massive, privately printed Paris edition of 1925 for an American readership, none of the power of Stein’s inventiveness is lost; indeed, some have contended that by skillfully eliminating so many of Stein’s redundancies and compositional tics, Fay improved the text.
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