For THE MAKING OF THE AMERICANS, Holly Melgard takes Gertrude Stein’s credo “there is no such thing as repetition” literally and applies it to Stein’s highly repetitious and hard to read tome The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress from 1925. Thus, “every word and punctuation mark is retained according to its first (and hence last) appearance in Gertrude Stein’s 925-page edition of the book” (Holly Melgard, “Foreword”), deleting any other instance of repetition.

This reading confronts Stein’s procedural text with the assumptions of digital word processing, shrinking it to merely twenty-one pages of “unique” content that evolves from readable sentences to a list of words. Melgard also adds page-spans of the original on each page to show how many pages are covered by its words. Melgard makes another easily overlooked intervention by adding the definite article “the” to the title, thereby, as Paul Stephens notes, “restrict[ing] the range of reference (paradoxically) from all Americans to some Americans” and “complicat[ing] Stein’s narrative of assimilation.” He also points out another difference between the two poets: “Whereas it took the wealthy and well-connected Stein fourteen years to find a publisher for her modernist masterpiece, Melgard’s reduced version was self-published instantaneously on Lulu.com at no expense to the author” (Paul Stephens, absence of clutter, 203-204).