From The Making of Americans Gleanings from the Book by Gertrude Stein

Once an angry man dragged his Father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." - It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these, our sins, are, of all sins, the really harmless ones to own - nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away... Stein wrote the bulk of 'The Making of Americans' between 1903 and 1911, and evidence from her manuscripts suggests three major periods of revision during that time. The manuscript remained mostly hidden from public view until 1924 when, at the urging of Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford agreed to publish excerpts in the transatlantic review. In 'The Making of Americans' Stein writes, "the important matter in the history of the Dehning family is the marrying of Julia"[4] to Alfred Hersland, and Stein describes the members of each of their families - as well as several peripheral characters with whom the families are acquainted - in insistent, painstaking detail. The book lacks chapter divisions, but it is roughly divided into sections corresponding to the lives of one generation of Herslands: Alfred, his wife Julia (née Dehning), and his siblings, Martha and David. The book contains many autobiographical elements. Some scholars argue that David Hersland is a fictional representation of Gertrude Stein's brother Leo. Gossols, the Western city that the Hersland family calls home, is said to be a stand-in for the Steins' hometown of Oakland, California. 'The Making of Americans', along with 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas', is likely the most accessible of Gertrude Stein's more important works.