The Making of Americans

Born in Pittsburgh, Gertrude Stein was brought up in Oakland, California. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1898, afterward enrolling at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Abandoning her medical degree, Stein moved to Paris in 1903 by way of London with her elder brother Leo, becoming involved with art criticism and collecting works before beginning her literary career. In Paris, Stein composed daring works in poetry, prose, and drama. Her first work, a collection of short stories titled Three Lives, was published in 1909, and around the same time, she composed The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress, an epic novel that forgoes conventional devices such as narration and dialogue. In the interwar years, Stein became a leading voice of Anglo-American modernism and a pivotal figure in French- and English-language cultural life, regularly hosting salons attended by prominent figures in the French avant-garde, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as well as emerging American writers like Ernest Hemingway. Her life partner was Alice B. Toklas.