Product Description

With his U.S.A. trilogy, comprising THE 42nd PARALLEL, 1919, and THE BIG MONEY, John Dos Passos is said by many to have written the great American novel. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultivating what Edmund Wilson once called their "own little corners," John Dos Passos was taking on the world. Counted as one of the best novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library and by some of the finest writers working today, U.S.A. is a grand, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation, buzzing with history and life on every page.

The trilogy opens with THE 42nd PARALLEL, where we find a young country at the dawn of the twentieth century. Slowly, in stories artfully spliced together, the lives and fortunes of five characters unfold. Mac, Janey, Eleanor, Ward, and Charley are caught on the storm track of this parallel and blown New Yorkward. As their lives cross and double back again, the likes of Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie make cameo appearances.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77919 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
"The single greatest novel any of us have written, yes, in this country in the last one hundred years." -- Norman Mailer

Review

From the Publisher
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Customer Reviews

A Brilliant, overlooked work of American fiction
When I first came across John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) as a teenager I thought they were the most exciting books I'd read to date. I was enthralled by its scope, its style, and its highly politicized substance. Dos Passos' montage-style (that seemed to be some sort of homage to the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein) mixed interwoven story lines of fictional characters with brief contemporary biographies of famous contemporaries. To that he added "newsreel" items, brief inserts from news clippings of the day that gave some sense of the cultural and political world these characters inhabited. Last, Dos Passos added subjective, autobiographical snippets (the "Camera Eye") that served as some sort of exterior voice of the author. I was concerned when I picked up 42nd Parallel many years later that I would find that my excitement was more the product of teenage naivete than from reading a truly unique literary work. Happily, I was not disappointed to find that the USA Trilogy remains for me, a wonderful piece of writing, one that has fallen inexplicably out of the American literary cannon.

Seventy years later we think of American fiction from the 1920s and 1930s as being dominated by three writers, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. It is not much remembered that at the time Dos Passos was thought of as an essential fourth. When 42nd Parallel was published Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Upon publication of The Big Money in 1936 Dos Passos made the cover of the August 10, 1936 issue of Time Magazine.

42nd Parallel is a wonderful title for Volume I of the Trilogy. The 42nd Parallel of latitude runs right through the heart of the USA. Starting from the west it forms the north/south boundary of California, Nevada and part of Utah from Oregon and Idaho. Running east it crosses Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and the New York/Pennsylvania border. After cutting across Connecticut it reaches the Atlantic Ocean just where the Pilgrims landed, at Plymouth Rock.

Dos Passos' 42nd Parallel cuts a similar swath across the USA. Set roughly in the years from 1900 to the First World War, Dos Passos traces the lives of five characters, each from a different part of the country and each with a different class and cultural background. We are presented with the stories of Fainy McCreary (Mac), Janey, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eleanor Stoddard, and Charley Anderson. As the stories progress they converge (personally or geographically) and diverge sometimes as randomly as two ships passing in the night. We have a range of characters from a card carrying member of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies) in Mac to a budding man of wealth and importance in the new field of public relations (Moorehouse). Some hop trains and tramp from town to town looking for jobs or social unrest. Others strive for respectability and try to make a `nice' middle class life for themselves.

In between chapters Dos Passos provides us with biographical sketches of famed Americans such as Thomas Edison, Bob La Follette, Andrew Carnegie, and Luther Burbank. Also interspersed throughout the book are the Newsreels and what Dos Passos called "The Camera Eye" made up of his own musings on his life and times. All of the fictional characters live for the moment and don't engage in any literary musings on the meaning of life and their role in it. The Camera Eye seems, in many respects, to consist of Dos Passos setting out his own interior life, something missing from his characters. 42nd Parallel is a politically charged piece of work and is fully representative of the highly charged and turbulent early years of the 20th-century.

By the time I was finished with the 42nd Parallel any qualms I had about revisiting Dos Passos had long since evaporated. I recommend this book to anyone who, like me, read the book many, many years ago. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who hasn't yet discovered The USA Trilogy. You won't be disappointed.

A realisitc and unforgiving look at America before WWI.
This is the first volume of the USA trilogy. It takes some effort to read because of the innovative form the author uses to relate what America was like before WWI. He centers his book around the lives of several central characters and their adventures. Interspersed biographies of famous Americans like Henry Ford are fascinating. The illustrations by (I can't remember the artist's name) are American classics and are of great value in appreciating the text. The 42nd Parallel was known as the major storm path across North America. Dos Passos tracks the gritty lives of the working and middle class Americans with whom he identifies. His detailed map of our national life shows the great divide between our material well-being today and the struggle for existence waged by working class Americans before the New Deal. Great characterizations and descriptions of early 20th century USA.

USA Trilogy - Part I
This first part of Dos Passos' acclaimed "USA" trilogy takes the reader from the start of the 20th-century up to America's entry in World War I through the alternating life stories of five regular (white) citizens. Had he stopped there, the book might have been perfect, but modernist experimentations creep in through the "Newsreel" and "The Camera's Eye" sections and muddy up the work. These are kind of abstract prose collages or montages comprised of headlines, snatched phrases of songs, news clippings, and random phrases -- presumably intended to convey some of the mood and seeming frenetic pace of the time. The fourth element in his brew are brief sketches of notable figures of American history (some more familiar to contemporary readers than others), including Thomas Edison, "Gene" Debs, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Charles Steinmetz (pioneering electrical engineer) and more. However, if one can ignore all of Dos Passos' uneven futzing around with these various elements, there's quite a good social history underneath. When writing about his five core characters, he's very straightforward and proves to be an engaging storyteller.

Dos Passos uses his five characters to show the pre-war period as a time of great change in America, when the political field was still wide open and the opportunities for social mobility were a tangible lure to young people. Probably the closest to his heart is the first one we meet, a poor Irish-American apprentice printer from Connecticut named Mac. His picaresque adventures take him train-hopping around the country and into a turbulent Mexico, taking on odd jobs and working for the labor movement. Raised by Fenian rebels, he's a card carrying Wobbly and proud of it. The middle three characters are middle-class strivers. Janey is a Washington, DC stenographer whose halcyon days of youth end when her teen crush dies in a car wreck and her golden boy brother joins the merchant marine. Eleanor is a naive Chicago girl who is introduced into a "arty" set and eventually works her way up in the world to become a fashionable Manhattanite interior decorator. Both of these women's lives eventually intersect with that of J. Ward Moorehouse, an industrious Delaware boy who manages to latch on to a rich wife and leverages that to make a name for himself in advertising and public relations. A Minnesotan hick named Charley forms the working class bookend to the five characters. Like Mac, he wanders the country, living close the edge and picking up mechanic or carnival jobs where he can, and gets interested in the labor movement.

As the lives of these characters unfold over the decade and a half, we see the energetic face of modern America emerging. The rise and fall of unions, the rise of the working woman, the rise of advertising and media spin, the tension between government and the people, the rise of American hegemony and nationalism, and the inevitable class divide -- the one area that escapes major attention is race. Lest this sound rather dry and boring, the five characters go through personal and professional trials and tribulations familiar to our time. Playing an especially large role in the characters' lives are love and sex, the former generally playing out poorly, and the latter sordidly. There's an interesting tension that surfaces off and on through the lives of the male characters, in which females divert them from their avowed course. This is introduced very early in the book when Mac is warned by his father that he must stay away from women, because women will make you "sell out" and betray the revolution. The idea that a man can't be an effective revolutionary if he's got a woman to deal with is a recurring one -- which is not to say that women don't have their own problems throughout the story -- and it would be interesting to see a feminist analysis of the book. In any event, once you get used to the structure and style and concentrate on the core characters, it remains a very readable and important portrait of America's history from the perspective of a social revolutionary.