SOURCE: "Weininger and The Making of Americans," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 8-26.

In the following essay, Katz explains Gertude Stein's initial encounters with and eventual assimilation of Weininger's theories and the ways in which they affected her writing and her views of character and gender.

It is a significant mistake that [Gertrude] Stein remembered starting The Making of Americans in 1906 and finishing it in 1908.¹ As with many of her inaccurate reflections, this one was patently false and yet bore a kind of truth that explains its error. For from the spring of 1906, when she took up work on the novel in earnest, she pursued her original purpose of showing "the old world in the new or more exactly the new world all made out of the old"; but in the summer of 1908 the book suddenly began to develop explicitly and in earnest the understanding...