This should be compulsory reading in high school English classes as a counterbalance to the Great Gatsby. John Dos Passos presents such molecular portraits of a nation caught in the swell of social change, depicting America in 1914 via protracted vignettes of the everyman (and woman) whose only shared story is a sort of cultural transience and a hapless fate of being trod upon by systemic forces much larger than them. Though Dos Passos clearly sympathizes with the little guy as a principle, this book is surprisingly apolitical- socialism, crony capitalism, patriarchy, anarchy, and every other pertinent social system or movement are at some point or another the formless villains that confound the struggles of the everyman to get by in the world. In every instance, the individual is embattled and enveloped by an inescapable social fabric that lures then breaks them, offers glimmers of hope then subjugates them and robs them of their money, their family, and their integrity. The stories of USA’s protagonists are told with a poignant simplicity, avoiding narrative cliches or moralizing arcs. These ordinary citizens are neither fully sympathetic nor fully detestable. They’re just completely human, and their humanity comes through in beautifully direct pose that does more with simple statements than any description of psychology or inner lives.

I could write a dissertation on this (or just reams of endless raving) but the point is this is one of the best pieces of historical fiction ever written. It also manages to be one of the greatest pieces of humanist Americana without resorting to nostalgic descriptions or romanticism. What John Dos Passos has accomplished here is a crystal clear panorama of a place and a time, evoked so simply but with such magnificent detail that it’s hard to believe the vast majority of his prose is not autobiographical. What an incredible work.

“They buried him under a cedar tree
His favorite photograph
was of a little tot
standing beside a bed of hybrid
everblooming double Shasta daisies
with never a thought of evil
And Mount Shasta
in the background, used to be a volcano
but they don’t have volcanoes
anymore.”

This is one of those books that make you wonder “What did I miss?” I see plenty of wonderful reviews rating this highly. But in my listening to the audio version, I didn’t get that much out of it. I did enjoy the snippets of stories of the characters involved, and I liked the way it captured the time, but it really didn’t fit together well. Perhaps I need to continue listening to the trilogy to get that level of completeness and closure. This by itself didn’t do it.

Audio wasn’t the way to experience this. Dos Passos tells jumbled chapters of interwoven stories about a handful of characters. In addition, he uses various other devices to set the mood, describe the celebrities of the day, and describe personal stories. The problem is that on audio these all ran together, so that you might miss the transition and all of the sudden the characters and story has jumped somewhere else. This happened to me at least a dozen times. Also odd was that one thing Dos Passos did to set the stage was record song lyrics. In the audio book, these snippets are sung in an old-timey way that unfortunately was just not pleasant.

I need to qualify my upcoming bold statement with two disclaimers. First off, I'm already on record as being underwhelmed by the hallowed novel I'm about to mention in my forthcoming bold statement. Second, The 42nd Parallel is only the first part of a three volume trilogy that should probably be considered as a whole, and I have only read this volume. But what's the point of writing these reviews if your not going to bring strong opinions. So despite the aforesaid reservations, here it goes: whatever Jack Keroauc was trying to do with On the Road was done twenty years earlier in a more elegant, interesting, engaging and just over-all better fashion by John Dos Passos with his U.S.A. Trilogy.

The U.S.A. Trilogy is a work of historical fiction that takes place from the beginning of the 20th century to around 1930. I know what your thinking, how can I compare Keroauc's "great American road novel" with a piece of historical fiction. Well, Dos Passos didn't write a typical example of historical fiction. He isn't interested in fictionalizing historical figures and/or events. You might feel tempted to draw comparisons with Doctorow's Ragtime. Dos Passos must have been a large influence on Doctorow, the two books share a similar time frame and themes. However, U.S.A., written over fifty years before Ragtime, is more unique and, strangely enough, more modern.

Like Doctorow, Dos Passos isn't concerned with telling the stories of specific individuals, but in using individual examples to give a sense of an overall whole. Doctorow does this by refusing to personalize his characters, they remain "Mother," "The Boy," "Mother's Brother," etc. While Dos Passos gives his characters Christian names, The 42nd Parallel is even less significantly "about" its characters than Ragtime.None of Dos Passos characters meet Emma Goldman or Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There are no moments where a character exclaims something like, "We've booked passage back on the White Star Line. They say their new vessel is unsinkable." While the stuff of history plays a prominent part in The 42nd Parallel it is encountered in a way most of us encounter the historic events of our own time, as something that has already happened to others. The characters don't really affect the course of events, and the course of event's don't really have a great effect on the characters. Dos Passos isn't trying to give the reader an idea of how the times were experienced on an individual level, he is more interested in the collective experience. As cheesy as this may sound, U.S.A. is mainly concerned about its title character.

To fully convey this argument, I need to talk a little about the trilogy's overall structure. Dos Passos uses four different "devices" to tell his story. The most conventional of these, are chapters telling the story of one of four characters. Overall, we follow twelve characters, six men and six women, through the trilogy. These characters provide a compelling and reasonably diverse sampling of early 20th century Americans.*I should note, while these chapters take up the great majority of the novel they are really no more than character sketches. It's compelling, but not necessarily ground breaking or momentous material considered by itself. However, the strength of the novel lies in how Dos Passos supplements these narratives using other techniques. The conventional chapters are followed by what Dos Passos calls "Newsreels." Here, actual news headlines and portions of articles, as well as popular songs contemporary to the narrative are kind of spliced together to create avant-garde(ish) prose passages. Let me just give a randomly picked example:

lights go out as Home Sweet Home is played to patrons low wages cause unrest, woman says

There's a girl in the heart of Maryland
With a heart that belongs to me

WANT BIG WAR OR NONE

the mannequin who is such a feature of the Paris racecourse surpasses herself in the launching of novelties. She will put on the most amazing costume and carry it with perfect sangfroid. Inconsistency is her watchword
Three German staff officers who passed nearby were nearly mobbed by enthusiastic people who insisted on shaking their hands

Girl Steps on Match; Dress Ignited; Dies

And Mary-land
Was fairy-land
When she said that mine she'd be

This might not be the best example, but it provides you with a good idea of what these passages are. Some other reviewers have complained about this, saying that when they were interested in a headline Dos Passos would jump away and it wouldn't be mentioned again. I can sympathize with this feeling, but it's asking for something fundamentally different from what the authors trying to do. You don't have recognize any of the news items to appreciate the novel. They are there, as Dos Passos himself said, "to give an inkling of the common mind of the epoch.

Dos Passos inserts himself in the novel through "The Camera Eye," 27 short, autobiographical, stream of conscience, passages. This device, heavily influenced by Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can also be a little disorienting because no context is provided.** Again though, complete comprehension of how it all fits isn't necessary or even what the author is expecting. Finally, interlaced in the text are several somewhat poetic, somewhat gonzo, biographical sketches of prominent figures in the era. Dos Passos includes these because "their lives seem to embody so well the quality of the soil in which Americans of these generations grew."

So remember how way back in the first paragraph I mentioned Keroauc. Well here's where the comparison comes in. I believe Dos Passos and Keroauc shared a identical idea, and U.S.A. and On the Road are both fundamentally expressions of this common idea. In the revised prologue to The 42nd Parallel written after the publication of the final volume of the trilogy, Dos Passos describes a nameless man who is completely solitary but not alone. Allow me to quote a long passage, because it's pretty fucking amazing:

Only the ears busy to catch the speech are not alone; the ears are caught tight, linked tight by the tendrils of phrased words, the turn of a joke, the singsong fade of a story, the gruff fall of a sentence; liking tendrils of speech twine through the city blocks, spread over pavements, grow out along parked avenues, speed with the trucks leaving on their long night runs over roaring highways, whisper down sandy byroads past wornout farms, joining up cities and fillingstations, roundhouses, steamboats, planes groping along airways; words call out on mountain pastures, drift slow down rivers widening to the sa and the hushed beaches.
It was not in the long walks through jostling crowds at night that he was less alone, or in the training camp at Allentown, or in the day on the docks at Seattle, or in the empty reek of Washington City hot boyhood summer nights, or in the meal on Market Street, or in the swim off the red rocks at San Diego, or in the bed full of fleas in New Orleans, or in the cold razor wind off the lake, or in the gray faces trembling in the grind of the gears in the street under Michigan Avenue, or in the smokers of limited expresstrains, or walking across country, or riding up the dry mountain canyons, or the night without a sleeping bag among frozen beartracks in the Yellowstone, or canoeing Sundays int the Quinnipiac;
but in his mother words about longago, in his father's telling about when I was a boy, in the kidding stories of uncles, in the lies the kids told at school, the hired man's yarns, the tall tales of the doughboys told after taps;
it was speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U.S.A.
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 pictures theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out written in by a Western Union Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniform in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.

Whew, sorry about the extended block quote, but isn't that friggin' amazing? Am I wrong or do we learn the same thing from Sal Paradise?I think Keroauc and Dos Passos had similar ideas and goals. Let me be clear that I'm not completely dismissing On the Road If you were to make a Venn Diagram of the two novels there would be similarities but each would have its own well-defined circle. However, one of the reasons On the Road is considered by some to be the great American novel is because it so ably distills one particular pie slice of U.S.A. Personally, I think Dos Passos, in addition to being a better writer, gives you a bigger more satisfying piece. Dos Passos' U.S.A. is a better illustration of "the link that tingled in the the blood."

*The glaring exception to my diversity claim is that all of the characters are white. At least in the first volume of the trilogy, Dos Passos does not seem particularly concerned with race issues. Class relations is the great contentious issue in this volume.

**Just wanted to note here that the chronology of Dos Passos' life provided in my Library of America Edition helped here. Moreover, it was worth reading on its own. JDP lived a hell of an interesting life. I'm not sure what his wikipedia page is like but it might be worth checking out.

John Dos Passos doesn't seem to get as much credit as his literary contemporaries and buddies (man I would love to have heard some of these conversations between the literary greats of the 20th century), but I've been hearing for ages that his U.S.A trilogy is a classic of the last century so I finally decided to start it.

Dos Passos is aiming for that literary hallowed ground, The Great American Novel. He winds together the story of several working class people in the early 1900s who are attempting to work their way up in the world using every wile at their convenience. Mixed with that are some stream of consciousness bits that remind me of James Joyce but slightly more readable. Oh, and some brief poetic biographies of famous agitators/politicians/leaders of the time. Everything was just slightly socialist tinged, by the way. I'm sure this was very edgy at the time, in combination with the Joycean interludes (not sure who came first, but Joyce is certainly more famous for this writing style so I'm giving him the adjective). I'm tempted to say some of this feels dated nowadays given that things certainly did not go the way of the People's Revolution but it captures a spirit of the times very well. And perhaps it's more relevant than it seems at first glance, given the current protestations that have shut down France in the worst protest of five decades.

Beyond the controversial politics, I found Dos Passo's storytelling just stellar. Despite the fact that he was telling the story of 5 or 6 pretty average unromantic people, leading average lives in which the end of every episode ends in them being either flat broke or doing something only marginally morally ok, I was glued to the page. The interludes were mercifully brief and although at first annoying, by the end of the book I had begun to feel that they added something to the mood.

Perhaps one could accuse Dos Passos of being bleak in his outlook. The amount of agency he allows his characters is severely circumscribed- the women play up mostly their personal attractiveness and sometimes abilities (although in general his women are more competent than his men) to get access to power and money. Eleanor Stoddard was my favorite of these characters- blessed with a natural elegance, she learns French and plays up her chic-ness while touring the Art Institute to begin moving up in the world. Eventually she ends an interior decorator in NYC, always just one step in front of bankruptcy but at least wearing a fabulous new outfit while doing it. It is interesting that romance is portrayed as fraught with dangers for women in this world. For men as well, in fact, but the ambitious women in this book steer well clear, while the men dabble in marriage and affairs, usually eventually leaving the women involved without a second thought.

The men in 42nd Parallel follow a different trajectory. Some of the characters, like Mac, have a distinct On the Road type flair to them. He wanders all over the US and even Canada and Mexico, occasionally stopping to mine or lumberjack or even get married and have children, but nothing sticks for long and soon he is flat broke and on the road again, always with his socialist ideals in the back of his mind. Ward is an interesting one as well, perhaps the greatest success story of them all- hobnobbing with heads of state and Carnegies through first his wives' connections and then his business. However, it is all clear what a house of cards it all is when his second wife's mother threatens to cut off his capital, saved only by the outbreak of WW1.

There is a clear agenda here, of course. The ugliness of capitalism, the transience of life in a place where you are only as good as your last dollar, the range of human emotion reduced to the struggle to afford a roof for tonight and another meal. But it is also a glorious adventure, filled with the wildness of chance and the variety of human nature. I could hardly put it down.

Highly enjoyable book once you figure out how to read all of Dos Passos new literary devices such as Camera Eye and Newsreels. Good picture of the common man in America in the time leading up to WW 1.

Summary of the book: men want to have sex with prostitutes but they are scared of diseases so they don't. Ward has blue eyes. Men marry women and then hate them. It's gay but not clearly stated and it's anti-capitalist and clearly stated. I read Y.W.C.A as YMCA during the whole book and only noticed half way.

I wasn't very far into this when I knew I was reading something very special. Yes, it is an experimental novel where its construction is unusual. I suppose "unusual" is an understatement. This novel, and I'm hoping the trilogy, is a reflection of United States society. Politically Dos Passos was a socialist/communist. The time period of the novel is pre-WWI, a time when that movement was beginning to be come popular. There was less opportunity for people to rise economically. Dos Passos uses his characters to show the contrast between rich and poor.

The chapters of each of the characters is normal writing style. These chapters make up the majority of the novel. Each tells of one specific character. Eventually, some of the characters meet each other so that the chapter of one character might also include actions of another. My reading about the trilogy indicates there will be 12 of these characters. This first installment includes only 6 of them, although two others are named.

Inserted between these "character" chapters are where the experimental writing happens. One type is titled "Newsreel". These include lines of popular songs of the era, what I interpret as newspaper headlines and excerpts of news stories and perhaps even advertising. A second type is titles "camera eye". The prose style in these can only be called stream of consciousness. There is no actual character of this "consciousness". I found these one or two page short sections aptly named. The last type are a very few biographies of real people. The writing style of these is neither all normal prose nor all stream of consciousness. There aren't very many of these and some have more of one style than the other.

I wouldn't want a steady diet of novels constructed and written in this way. That said, I'm hoping to read the other two installments of the trilogy this spring. I'm definitely looking forward to the experience and anticipate their being 5-stars also.

I mostly enjoyed this book. I liked the portrayal of the early 20th-century working class movement in America. It felt like such a hopeful time. Also the coherence of early modern capitalism in the character of J Ward Moorehouse. I was excited from this book to read on, because it felt like the separate plot strands would begin to move into something bigger. Like he was setting the stage for something interesting. The ceaseless narrative was perhaps a skillful putting in place of all the pieces necessary for some showstopping moment. Full disappointment in my review of 1919.

The Camera Eye passages were incomprehensible and the Newsreel sections pretty confusing. I did like the biographical sections though.

If you were to ask a literati in the 1940's what American authors would still be read in 2013, Dos Passos would have been mentioned in some amazing company: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But I had never read him. The closest I came was a science fiction classic, n  Stand on Zanzibarn, which used Dos Passos' techniques. I though pretty average, so was sort of lukewarm at the thought of pulling n  The 42nd Paralleln off the shelf.

So I was shocked when I dusted it off, and cracked open the book. Amazingly detailed account of American life a century ago. Dos Passos' style reminds me, in some ways, of Walt Whitman's n  Leaves of Grassn -- it embraces everything American. From the low -- the rambling man & union rabble rouser Mac who travels from New York to the Mid West to Canada to miners' camps out West to San Francisco to Mexico -- to the high -- the influential PR man J. Ward Moorehouse.

Dos Passos' style is clean, crisp, American prose. Descriptive, but action oriented. Little introspection but, like Tolstoy, running a myriad of well-developed characters through actions and reactions that seem completely believable.

The most interesting thing for me is seeing labor and unions portrayed in such a positive light. My grandfather was active in the labor movement in the 1920's, and had been beaten several times by Pinkerton Guards in strikes. But I had been fed anti-union fiction, especially in the movies -- consider, for instance, Marlon Brando fighting a corrupt union boss in n  On the Waterfrontn, or the movie n  Hoffan. Where labor leaders are portrayed as thugs, generally in the hip-pocket of mobsters.

This is not true.

Another thing I appreciated was Dos Passos' equally compelling portrait of Capitalists like Moorehouse. He sees them not as evil people. Instead, Moorehouse, like the labor leaders, seem dedicated to opening productive channels of communication between owners and labor.

All in all, a very engaging, quick-reading classic that gives a pretty objective and all encompassing view of America in the early 20th Century. Highly recommended. Better than n  The Great Gatsbyn in my opinion. I cannot wait to tackle the other two dusty volumes that make up the trilogy.

Mac’s chapters are ok at first. But Newsreel, Camera eye?

The first installment of Dos Passos' classic USA Trilogy takes us through a polyphonic journey through the early 20th century across many of the areas of the US. It was rather cutting edge with various Joycean innovations such as the stream of consciousness (and apparently autobiographical) interjections called The Camera's Eye and the news snippets called Newsreels as well as some short biographical sketches. The characters are both male and female (although mostly white with some degree of expressed racism) and one of the pervading themes revolve around the IWW, or Wobblies, movements during these turbulent times. We see Manhattan (so recently drawn by Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer), Chicago, and various other places before the first world war. I enjoyed the text and found it moved relatively quickly. The characters were rather well-drawn, even if all do not have a happy ending.
42nd Parallel is an interesting addition to the US literary canon and I can't wait to read 1919 now.

This is a good book to listen to in the audible format because the presentation of the book is done quite well. This is the first book of the trilogy and takes you through the entry of the US into World War I.

The book was written in the 1920s and published in 1930. But the style of writing is very smooth and contemporary. The book uses a number of mechanisms to take you back into the era where the events of the story are happening. You may not be well-versed with all of the references but there are many of them and you will probably be familiar with some of them. Lack of knowledge about early 20th century current events will not distract much from your enjoyment and appreciation of the story.

The book includes some biographies of people who are well known from that time as well as headlines and music. But the bulk of the story is told with fictional characters who are representative of a variety of people. There are people who are relatively well off or trying to hook themselves on to people who are well-off or who are by accident or premonition starting off in careers that will place them in a good position to benefit financially. There are people in the working class who are struggling to make it at all and are shown to have a variety of determinations that may or may not allow them to make it at all in life.

I want to somehow describe the writing in this book as very smooth in spite of the reality that many of the descriptions are quite rough, not smooth at all. I assume that we are going to hear more about some of the fictional characters in the ensuing two books of the trilogy. You are left with some curiosity about how the various characters will manage to work themselves through the history that we all know is ahead of them.

This book does not hold the IWW up in big letters in the center of the stage but it does hold its place in the midst of the history of the time. This book takes a look at big history through a variety of people who benefited and suffered. Sometimes they deserved to succeed or fail due to their own actions but you might wonder just what was the role of fate for some.