The Making of Americans: Being the History of a Family's Progress. Annotated with references to The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein, 1903-1912

This edition of The Making of Americans includes The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein for the Making of Americans, 1903-12, edited by Leon Katz, based on interviews with Alice Toklas.The Notebooks is Professor Leon Katz's long anticipated full reconstruction, editing, annotation and "decoding" of Gertrude Stein's Notebooks covering her early years in Paris and her creation of her great modernist masterpiece, The Making of Americans.This book was born in Yale University’s Beinecke Library in 1954, when Professor Katz found several boxes of Stein's papers and began to put them in order, soon realizing they contained not only the source material, from Gertrude's own life, that could for the first time make comprehensible the dense impenetrable prose of The Making of Americans but also could shed enormous light on her famous life in France, her relationships with Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and hundreds more. The Notebooks contains:Katz’s transcriptions of Stein’s notebook entriesComments by Alice B. Toklas on the individual entries, elicited by Katz over 5 months in 1954Further comments by Katz on the entries and on Toklas’ reactions.Katz’s theory of Stein’s approach to the the novel.Over the years and decades the reputation of this book has grown enormous.Virgil Thomson, after reading an earlier draft of this book, said it is "a new pinnacle, high and possibly dangerous to inexpert negotiation, like a partly exposed iceberg, known as the Katz manuscript."Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker in 2005: "Although it has never come out as a printed book, in the world of Stein criticism and scholarship, it has become a kind of cult classic."Janet Malcolm also wrote that she and every Stein scholar she interviewed believe that The Making of Americans will only take its place "among the monuments of literary modernism" when the Leon Katz manuscript is published and Stein's book can finally be "understood, decoded, taught to students and appreciated by them."In this Kindle Print Replica edition:Each page reference to the novel in The Notebooks links to the correct page in the novel.Each page of the novel links to the correct position in the page-by-page summary in The Notebooks.Each page of the novel links back to the items in The Notebooks which refer to it.All references in The Notebooks to notebook entries link to those entries.Caution: While all of these links work in the Kindle Reader for Windows, they do not work in the IOS Kindle App for the iPad. Read more