Gertrude Stein Party! Hosted by Cecilia Konchar Farr

White Whale is proud to be part of the rich, literary community (and history!) of Pittsburgh. We are honored to collaborate with Cecilia Konchar Farr, Dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at West Liberty University, to celebrate the recent re-issue of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, one of the most influential and experimental novels from the modernist era. Gertrude is a Pittsburgh treasure, and we are ecstatic to celebrate this pivotal novel. We are excited to host Cecilia Konchar Farr who co-wrote a guide to reading the novel, As I was Saying..., to help readers find their way into this exciting but difficult experimental novel with just a little help.

In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946) was born in Pittsburgh to a prosperous German-Jewish family. She was educated in France and the United States, worked under the pioneering psychologist William James, and later studied medicine. With her brother Leo she was an important patron of the arts, acquiring works by many contemporary artists, most famously Picasso, while her home became a popular meeting place for writers and painters from Matisse to Hemingway. Her books include Three Lives, Tender Buttons, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

As I Was Saying...

An indispensable companion to Gertrude Stein’s masterpiece, The Making of Americans. One of the great works of 20th-century American fiction, Stein’s novel represents a peak of modernist literature: filled with repetition, overlapping and disintegrating plots, innumerable characters, and sentences stretching over pages. It is an immensely rewarding book, but also a potentially frustrating one.

At last, Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson offer a reader’s guide—the first of its kind. As I Was Saying is proof that The Making of Americans is not unreadable as charged, and offers accessible entry to the experimental writing Stein valued and promoted most—the original modernist novel by the era’s most influential author.

CECILIA KONCHAR FARR is Dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at West Liberty University. A longtime literature professor, she has authored and edited several books, including The Ulysses Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit, and Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way American Reads, along with many articles about popular novels, women readers, and book clubs. Her most recent publication is a companion to Gertrude Stein’s challenging, 1,000-page experimental novel The Making of Americans, entitled As I Was Saying and co-written with her former student Janie Sisson. It was released in December, alongside a centenary re-issue of Stein’s novel, from Dalkey Archive Press. A feminist theorist and faculty advocate, Dr. Konchar Farr lives in Pittsburgh in a 120-year-old house surrounded by hydrangea bushes just across the river from where Gertrude Stein was born.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher White Whale Bookstore