Beyond Narrative: The Making of Americans

Abstract

In 1906, having completed Three Lives, Gertrude Stein took up once again the unfinished novel. The Making of Americans, which she had begun in 1903. According to Leon Katz, who has worked extensively with Stein’s early manuscripts and notebooks, Stein began in 1906 making notes toward revising the old material.¹ It is not known how many chapters she had originally written since she destroyed part of the early manuscript, but she preserved its first five chapters, and these were to serve as the starting point of the new version of The Making of Americans, a novel which was eventually to run to 925 pages and to take five years to write. When we compare the extant text of the original to the revised version which occupies the first thirty-four pages of the completed novel, we can see exactly how drastically Stein’s purposes and procedures had changed from 1903 to 1906. Furthermore, if we compare the first thirty-four pages, in which Stein balanced the old way of writing and the new, to the rest of The Making of Americans, most of it written between 1908 and 1911, we can see an even more radical change taking place in Stein’s style and in her approach to the business of writing.