John Dos Passos: U.S.A. (LOA #85): The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big MoneyLibrary of America, 1996 - 1288 pages Unique among American books for its epic scope and panoramic social sweep, U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. Now The Library of America presents an exclusive one-volume edition of this enduring masterwork by John Dos Passos, including for the first time detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events that serve as a backdrop. In the novels that make up the trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics. A startling range of experimental devices captures the textures and background noises of twentieth-century life: “Newsreels” with blaring headlines; autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness; “biographies” evoking emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen, and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling power, tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the Depression. The U.S.A. trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. Their crisscrossing destinies take in wars and revolutions, desperate love affairs and harrowing family crises, corrupt public triumphs and private catastrophes, in settings that include the trenches of World War I, insurgent Mexico, Hollywood studios in the silent era, Wall Street boardrooms, and the tumultuous streets of Boston just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The volume contains newly researched chronologies of Dos Passos’s life and of world events cited in U.S.A., notes, and an essay on textual selection. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. |
From inside the book
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Page 322
... dollars if Mac would give him a sixtyday note hypothecat- ing his share in the bookstore for two hundred dollars . He said that he was an American citizen and a Christian and was risking his life to save Mac's wife and children . Mac ...
... dollars if Mac would give him a sixtyday note hypothecat- ing his share in the bookstore for two hundred dollars . He said that he was an American citizen and a Christian and was risking his life to save Mac's wife and children . Mac ...
Page 52
... dollars in his pocket walking through Red Hook looking for a boarding house . After he'd been a couple of days ... dollars , half payable in advance , and that he'd advise him to have a bloodtest taken to see if he had syphilis too and ...
... dollars in his pocket walking through Red Hook looking for a boarding house . After he'd been a couple of days ... dollars , half payable in advance , and that he'd advise him to have a bloodtest taken to see if he had syphilis too and ...
Page viii
... dollars and I haven't been really what you might call well since , and so I had to draw out my savings- account and now it's all gone . The family won't do any- thing because they've been listening to some horrid lying stories too silly ...
... dollars and I haven't been really what you might call well since , and so I had to draw out my savings- account and now it's all gone . The family won't do any- thing because they've been listening to some horrid lying stories too silly ...
Contents
It was that emancipated race | 3 |
The Camera Eye 2 we hurry wallowing | 13 |
MAC | 29 |
Copyright | |
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