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Textbook (Hardcover - New Edition)
TEXTBOOK INFORMATION
Unique among American novels for its epic scope and panoramic and social sweep, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. In the novels that make up the trilogyThe 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)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. In his prologue Dos Passos writes:
U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil...But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.
The trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars.
In honor of his centennial, Dos Passos is being drafted into the prestigious Library of America collection with his greatest work. This volume gathers the three novels known generically as U.S.A.; The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1933) along with scholarly notes and a chronology of the author's life. The Library of America edition of U.S.A. is undoubtedly among the finest ever published. Dos Passos couldn't have received a better birthday present. For all fiction collections.
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February 02, 2002: John Dos Passos rode the rails as a hobo with former CBS new commetator Eric Severed. This fiction is woven intricately with factual American History never found in classroom text. It includes accounts of Lt. Dwight Eisenhower participating in a massacre of American WW I veterans on the White House lawn; Henry Ford's employees machine gunning down American citizens during the great depression who were looking for jobs. This work is a must read for anyone seriosly interested in US history. One of my favorite trilogies of all time.