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Gertrude Stein's The making of Americans

by George B. Moore

For Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans was always her masterpiece. A novel of unparalleled scope and encyclopedic ambition, it is a family history that at once becomes an expose of the possibilities of modern art, language, and psychology. George Moore's study is the first to examine, in its entirety, the novel and its role in the development of Stein's aesthetic. Through a comprehensive analysis of her use of repetition, her theories of art and human character, and her changing relationship to writing itself, Moore argues convincingly for the psychological basis of Stein's theory of language, and the centrality of The Making of Americans to the development of Stein's modernism.