U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money

of John Dos Passos, Daniel Aaron (Editor), Townsend Ludington (Editor)

Series: The U.S.A. Trilogy

star star star star star

4.11 (4643 reviews)

$ 13.87

Description

In the novels that make up the U.S.A.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 20th-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.

Gender

Fiction Fiction Classics Literature American Novels Historical Fiction Politics 20th Century The United States Of America United States

Main Characters

Mac Smith Janey Williams J. Ward Moorehouse Eleanor Stoddard Charley Anderson Joe Williams Richard Ellsworth Savage Eveline Hutchins Daughter Ben Compton Mary French Margo Dowling