First of all I have to confirm that indeed this is a great American novel. You get a good insight in life at the start of the 20th century, how the war in Europe was changing the way of life in the USA and though it's hard to imagine that indeed at that time there was some communist sympathy in the US.
Dos Passos introduces some characters who meet later in the book but also disappear from the story from time to time. To me it makes it harder to feel for the characters and get into their mind. Most characters are sometimes also bit one dimensional, drinking, quiting jobs, going to bars and searching for women, etc... Most popular characters for me were Joe Williams and Charley Anderson.
Then there also are the Newsreel and Camera Eye parts. First added more to the book but to me the Camera Eye didn't work ( where the writer gives small interpretations of his surroundings at the time) and I lost my interest for these during reading.
So five stars it aint't for me, but 4 yes.

Many try to write the Great American novel, a few succeed; but none quite like John Dos Passos.

Jean-Paul Sartre said with a straight-face, ''the greatest writer of our time.'' Edmund Wilson said his writing was of ''the highest artistic seriousness.''

Early on he read deeply, he read everyone and often, he being multi-lingual, traveling extensively from the age of 11, "I want to swallow the world whole and still be able to look at it." This inspired the kind of political roller-coaster ride that would isolate him later in life.

Ironically, without such curiosity, how could he possibly have conveyed America in such an epic way; over 1000 pages; covering everything. The trilogy includes The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money. He allows our American zeitgeist to set sail from Victorian into modern, within an intricate, international cocktail party, including everyone, pre-dating the conventional six degrees of separation.

Dos Passos is the absolute master of demotic dialogue; our dialogue, our way, displayed on every single page. Each book can be read separately, each chapter; every character, fictional or not, so technically brilliant, like Picasso, Dos Passos could then effortlessly conquer all aspects, playing with his form as he may. And so he did. The main course of this herculean literary meal is American yet we're entertained with the odd amuse bouche from France.

For example, after the Great War our citizens figured out ways to remain in the prettiest city they'd ever seen, before going home; how could you blame them. So there, in Paris, in la lumiere we glimpse the rather cynical birth of The League of Nations; conveniently located@ Hotel de Crillon. Daily we read about Americans dealing with war, the foreigners, while walking or driving down Rue Rivoli towards its headquarters at Place de la Concorde.

Every single major American is there, executing great purpose, in the process of or just about to create the center of the universe. Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Frank Lloyd Wright and all the rest.

Interesting to note the lack of PR flacks yet the novel could be a precursor to Edward Bernays, the nephew of Feud; he who would invent the modern propagandised matrix we exist within today.

As if lurking quietly behind his words there might as well be an image circa 1913; The National Association of Advertising meets in Baltimore underneath a huge electric sign that spells TRUTH in ten foot letters. As if the ability to erase memory from the public; so blank our canvas, so faceless the crowd, a uniform collective is effortlessly created.

Alas, who cares of all the great men, all the ideas, like Ford, who created the assembly line and cluttered our streets with gas guzzlers only to ultimately create his own little utopia where a car is nowhere to be seen.

So many men, so many great ideas in this novel, thuh novel, however, for the sake of space, let's focus on one little slice of life; a reckless woman named Isadora, when being reckless was part of our charm.

Art and Isadora

"In San Francisco in eighteen seventyeight Mrs. Isadora O'Gorman Duncan, a highspirited lady with a taste for the piano, set about divorcing her husband, the prominent Mr. Duncan, whose behavior we are led to believe had been grossly indelicate; the whole thing made her so nervous that she declared to her children that she couldn't keep anything on her stomach but a little champagne and oysters; in the middle of the bitterness and recriminations of the family row,

into a world of gaslit boardinghouses kept by ruined southern belles and railroadmagnates and swinging doors and whiskery men nibbling cloves to hide the whiskey on their breaths and brass spittoons and fourwheel cabs and basques and bustles and long ruffled trailing skirts (in which lecture-hall and concertroom, under the domination of ladies of culture, were the centers of aspiring life)

she bore a daughter whom she named after herself Isadora.

The break with Mr. Duncan and the discovery of his duplicity turned Mrs. Duncan into a bigoted feminist and an atheist, a passionate follower of Bob Ingersoll's lectures and writings; for God read Nature; for duty beauty, and only man is vile.

Mrs.Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her children in the love of beauty and the hatred of corsets and conventions and manmade laws. She gave pianolessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and mittens.

The Duncans were always in debt.

The rent was always due.

Isadora's earliest memories were of wheedling groceries and butchers and landlords and selling little things her mother had made from door to door,

helping hand valises out of back windows when they had to jump their bills at one shabbygenteel boardingly houses after another in the outskirts of Oakland and San Francisco.

The little Duncans and their mother were a clan; it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren't Catholics any more or Presbyterians or Quakers or Baptists; there were Artists.

When the children were quite young they managed to stir up interest among their neighbors by giving theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing; they were westerners, the world was a goldrush; they weren't ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms. She couldn't afford lessons in conventional dancing, so she made up dances of her own.

The moved to Chicago, Isador got a job dancing to The Washington Post at the Masonic Temple Roof Gardner for fifty a week. She danced at clubs. She went to see Augustin Daly and told him she'd discovered

The Dance

and went on in New York as a fairy in cheesecloth in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream with Ada Rehen.

The family followed her to New York. They rented a big room in Carnegie Hall, put mattresses in the corners, hung drapes on the wall and invented the first Greenwich Village studio.

They were never more than one jump ahead of the sheriff, they were always wheedling the tradespeople out of bills, standing the landlady up for the rent, coaxing handouts out of rich philstines.

Isador arranged recitals with Ethelbert Nevin

danced to readings of Omar Khayyam for society women at Newport. When the Hotel Windsor burned they lost all their trunks and the very long bill they owed and sailed for London on the cattleboat

to escape the materialism of their native America.

In London at the British Museum

they discovered the Greeks;

the Dance was Greek.

Under the smoky chimneypots of London, in the soot coated squares they danced in muslin tunics, they copied poses from Greek vases, went to lectures, artgalleries, concerts, plays, sopped up in a winter fifty years of Victorian culture.

Back to the Greeks.

Whenever they were put out of their lodgings for nonpayment of rent Isador led them to the best hotel and engaged a suite and sent the waiters scurrying for lobster and champagne and fruits outofseason; nothing was too good for Artists, Duncans, Greeks;

and the nineties London liked her gall.

In Kensington and even in Mayfair she danced at parties in private houses.

the Britishers, Prince Edward down,

were carried away by her preraphaelite beauty

her lusty American innocence

her California accent.

After London, Paris during the great exposition of nineteen hundred. She danced with Loie Fuller. She was still a virgin too shy to return the advances of Rodin the great master, completely baffled by the extraordinary behavior of Loie Fuller's circle of crackbrained invert beauties. The Duncans were vegetarians, suspicious of vulgarity and men and materialism. Raymond made them all sandals.

Isador and her mother and her brother Raymond went about Europe in sandals and fillets and Greek tunics

staying at the best hotels leading the Greek life of nature in a flutter of unpaid bills.

Isadora's first solo recital was at a theater in Budapest; after that she was the diva, had a loveaffair out of her carriage. Everything was flowers and handclapping and champagne suppers. In Berlin she was the rage.

With the money she made on her German tour she took the Duncans all to Greece. They arrived on a fishingboat from Ithaca. They posed in the Parthenon for photographs and danced in the Theater of Dionysus and trained a crowd of urchins to sing the ancient chorus from teh Suppliants and built a temple to live in on a hill overlooking the ruins of ancient Athens, but there was no water on teh hill and their money ran out before the temple was finished.

so they had to stay at the Hotel d'Angleterre and run up a bill there. when cridit gave out they took their chorus back to Berlin and put on teh Suppliants in ancient Greek. Meeting Isador in her peplum marching through the Tiergarten at the head of her Greek bosy marching in order all in Greek tunics, the kaiserin's horse shied,

and her highness was thrown.

Isador was the vogue.

She arrived in St. Petersburg in time to see the night funeral of the marchers shot down in front of the Winter Palace in 1905. It hurt her. She was an American like Walt Whitman; the murdering rulers of the world were not her people; the marchers were her people; artists were no on the side of hte machineguns; she was an American in a Greek tunic; she was for the people.

In St. Petersburg, still under the spell of the eightennth-century ballet of the court of the Sunking,

her dancing was considered dangerous by the authorities,

In Germany she founded a school with the help of her sister Elizabeth who did the organizing, and she had a baby by Godron Craig.

She went to America in triumph as she'd always planned and harried the home philstines with a tour; her followers were all the time getting pinched for wearing Greek tunics; she found no freedom for Art in America.

Back in Paris it was the top of the world; Art meant Isadora. At the funeral of the Prince de Polignac she met the mythical millionaire (sewingmachine king) who was to be her backer and to finance her school. She went off with him in his yacht (whatever Isadora did was Art )

to dance in the Temple at Paestum

only for him,

but it rained and the musicians all got drenched. So they all got drunk instead.

Art was the millionaire life. Art was whatever Isadora did. She was carrying the millionaire's child to the great scandal of the oldlady clubwomen and spinster artlovers when she danced on her second American tour;

she took to drinking too much and stepping to the footlights and bawling out the boxholders.

Isadora was at the height of glory and scandal and power and wealth, her school going, her millionaire was about to build her a theater in Paris, the Duncans were the priests of cult, (Art was whatever Isadora did).

when the car that was bringing her two children home from the other side of Paris stalled on the bridge across the Seine. Forgetting that he'd left the car in gear the chauffeur got out to crank the motor. The car started, knocked down the chauffeur, plunged off the bridge into the Seine.

The children and their nurse were drowned.

The rest of her life moved desperately on in the clatter of scandalized tongues, among the kidding faces of reporters, the threatening of bailiffs, the expostulations of hotel managers bringing overdue bills.

(Dos Passos continues on with Isadora as Art; young men, drink, on different continents until Isadora's end arrives, the end we've come to know all too well)

One day at a little restaurant at Golfe Juan she picked up a goodlooking young wop who kept a garage and drove a little Bugatti racer.

Saying that she might want to buy the car, she made him go to her studio to take her out for a ride;

her friends didn't want her to go, said he was nothing but a mechanic, she insisted, she'd had a few drinks (there was nothing left she cared for in the world but a few drinks and a goodlooking young man);

she got in beside him and she threw her heavilyfringed scarf round her neck with a big sweep she had and turned back and said,

with the strong California accent her French never lost;

Adieu, mes amis, je vais a la gloire.

The mechanic put his car in gear and started.

The heavy trailing scarf caught in the wheel, wound tight,

Her head was wrenched against the side of the car. The car stopped instantly; her neck was broken, her nose crushed, Isadora was dead."



God Bless America and may the literary gods continue to bless Dos Passos' most divinely inspired work; thuh US of A.

An Affair to Remember, one of the most romantic films of all time (particularly, I have in mind the 1957 American romance film starring Cary Grant (Nickie Ferrante) and Deborah Kerr (Terry McKay), has been like the steady tick-tock of a clock on my brains, not having ceased once since I have started my read of The USA Trilogy some weeks ago. Now that I have finished this fabulous book I feel the sound is still there, and I strongly hope it’s not going to get permanent. Saying that I don’t mean to imply this is a romantic book, oh far from it, but it has some spicy ingredients and episodes that refer to this theme too. As of this present moment I clearly remember couple of quotes from the movie, which are somehow matching my overall impression on what I feel is now the conclusion upon reading this book:

Terry McKay: What makes life so difficult?
Nickie Ferrante: People?

Interviewer: I'm sure you had some wonderful experiences in Europe.
Nickie Ferrante: Yes.
Interviewer: Would you care to expand on that statement?
Nickie Ferrante: No.

Funny enough this mega-lengthy book has been a great companion to me during the bygone recent weeks. I knew it’s an exquisite gem, and I have felt like I have read a much over-extended version of Dos Passos earlier work ‘Manhattan Transfer’, about the Strenuous Life – of those days that lash you full of energy and hope, but with just too many characters that populated dynamically this kaleidoscopic universe of the American life within the first quarter of the twentieth century. It is an interesting mix of both fictional and historical stories and facts, and despite its lengthy-ness, that gave in certain moments a feel of repetition, yet I have felt it very enjoyable and highly documentary. I quite liked that the author decided to split each life story, and not have it finished in one go, by inserting in-between some interesting parts – as are all those sections comprised under the generic name of “Camera Eye” – which to be honest caught my mind in a web like a spider as in most parts I could hardly get an idea of what that is talking about in that always peculiar heated stream of consciousness , and “Newsreel” – that capture some of the most famous headlines in the newspapers of the period, mostly presented as collages of news clippings intermixed with lyrics, which were so sentimental and lovely. But most of all, I found it very lively, pertinent and quite ironic the way he managed to shortlist individual biographies of some of the most prominent figures in those years: Gene Debs (Lover of Mankind), Luther Burbank (The Plant Wizard), Big Bill Haywood (a workingclass leader from coast to coast), Minor C. Keith (Emperor of the Caribbean), Andrew Carnegie (Prince of Peace), Thomas A. Edison (The Electrical Wizard), Steinmetz (Proteus), La Follette (Fighting Bob), Jack Reed (Playboy), Randolph Bourne, Theodore Roosevelt (The Happy Warrior), Paxton Hibben (A Hoosier Quixote), Thomas Woodrow Wilson (Meester Veelson), J. P. Morgan (The House of Morgan), Wesley Everest (Paul Bunyan) , John Doe (The Body of an American), Frederick Winslow Taylor (The American Plan), Henry Ford (Tin Lizzie), Veblen (The Bitter Drink), Art and Isadora, Rudolph Valentino (Adagio Dancer), The Campers at Kitty Hawk, Frank Lloyd Wright (Architect), William Randolph Hearst (Poor Little Rich Boy), Samuel Insull (Power Superpower). Reading about these people, was like going to Wikipedia and getting a flavoured summary of their life in some of their key points, but Dos Passos made it richly throbbing with sarcasm, vitality and irony, while trying to make a point of the “great American dream” that was the spirit and soul of most of them, something like a purpose of life, a strong sense of making good in life. Most of them, even for a short while, managed to fulfill their purpose, although in the public eyes, namely in other’s characters’ eyes, it was necessarily the best of happiness in life.
The book gave me a feel of a fragmented moving picture. Out of the three volumes, I found “The 42nd Parallel” most amusing, “Nineteen Nineteen” most moral-philosophy oriented, especially on war and social aspects, while “The Big Money” was the most entertaining from all the aspects, I could even say it’s a remake of “The Great Gatsby” under the fine experimental but mostly realism-filled brush of Dos Passos, wanting to get as rich in details and images of that transitory blooming period after WWI was over.
Well, I wish I could remember some loving or happy stories from those related in, but there is not even one as such. Which again, hits me on something I read in the memoirs collection “There is Simply Too Much to Think About” by Saul Bellow, where at some point he is having a kind of monologue on the purpose of the artist as writer in the human life, and he is thinking about a discussion he has read about in “Anti-Memoirs” by André Malraux, between the author himself and a priest, saying as follows:

≪ How long have you been listening to confessions?
About fifteen years…
And what did you learn from these confessions, about people?
First and foremost, that people are much more unhappy than ought anyone imagine, then ... the fundamental fact that there is no truly mature grown-up. ≫

USA has almost always been, in literature and popular consciousness, the metaphor for the land of opportunity, the portal for the immigrant to the New World, the stage of the American dream of success, the machine of the body economic. The USA Trilogy feels like a passionate critique of American capitalism in the early 20th century, a denunciation of a society that crushes the individual. The rapid-transit, discontinuous narrative brilliantly captures the pace of the cities’ life, the sense of brief, promiscuous contact with other lives. The metallically impersonal narrative voices carries the hard-edged tumult of the life in the USA cities, at the same time that it keeps us at a distance from the residents. Dos Passos seeks to record the history of his times, and even, perhaps, to affect it. The USA Trilogy, as a standalone masterpiece, is an excellent introduction to his work, an intriguing narrative experiment, and a fascinating portrait of the great American “land of promises” in the early years of the 20th century.

Well…I told my sister, I have no more pages of Dos Passos left to read, she replied, then you need to find a Tres Passos to continue with. Well, how about that? I am not sure of my next jump…waiting to play some tarot cards maybe

I was not overly impressed by any of the three books that made up Dos Passos' trilogy. I believe that the high literary opinion of this trilogy is built more on the shock value of its writing style than on its sheer literary merit. More form than function.

I will say that it did emphasize (or perhaps overemphisize) the depth and breadth of the grass roots socialist movement that took place in American in the first quarter of this century. After McCarthyism, fifty years of Cold War, it is hard to believe that Eugene Debs and other led such movement with some success. As Americans, we are so programmed to believe that socialism is anathema, but, at the time, it is apparent from this book and others from its era, that America wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

For a comprehensive portrait of the United States in the first 30 years of the twentieth century it would be hard to surpass USA. The historical events themselves are familiar how characters experience them is the value of this book. The somewhat inaccurately titledWorld War, for example is remote to all but the combatants. On the other hand the labor movement is quite immediate and widely felt, yet today I think most of us are not aware of just how tenuous and violent the struggle for fair treatment of workers was. For me, along with Trollope's The Way We l Live Now, USA is a vivid account of the nation's adolescence which makes it easier to understand how we got to where we are now.

Astounding! Among the finest books ever written. From this point on I propose that in cartoons, when a character is shown sleepless and reading a characteristically lengthy book, that that book be U.S.A instead of War and Peace.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman was talking about himself, but that quote could be the U.S.A. talking in Dos Passos overwhelming series of books that make up the U.S.A. trilogy. The trilogy is an outstanding document of how life was lived in the early part of the twentieth century up to the Depression. And I mean really how life was lived. Dos Passos attention to period details of how people dress, eat, room, travel, work, love, play and drink, drink and drink is shown in bringing his multitude of characters to life.

But it's the contradictions and oppositions that Dos Passos is concerned about. How the new way of modern life is embraced and resisted - sometimes by the same character! How the opposition of labor and capital tears apart the society while nobody sees the big picture (except, perhaps, Thorstein Veblen and, of course, the author). And it's the contradiction that all the main characters are madly on the make, shooting to the next big thing, whether it's money, "revolution", the movies, etc. while yearning for the stability they can't ever seem to get. Physically the perpetual motion machine is impossible, but figuratively, the people in the U.S.A. embody it.

In terms of technique, Dos Passos reminds me of Orson Welles. In fact, the book contains biographies of two of the role models of Citizen Kane - William Randolph Hearst and Samuel Insull. The bravura technique involves four basic types - 1. Following the lives of characters 2. Biographies of eminent or notorious Americans 3. Newsreel snippets of headlines and text of news events and 4. Impressionistic renderings of the memory of the author at various times and places. Together these techniques situate the reader into a front row seat of the 1900's through the 1920's. As I was finishing, I found I wanted more of these books for the times afterwards! But I think I'd find, that while the characters and events have changed, Americans are still restless and still unclear how organized labor and uncompassionate capital need each other.

I'm used to meandering, styled novels; panoramic in nature, details and mixed history with fiction. This has all America of the years either side of WW1. But I didn't end up enjoying it for several reasons:
1) My mistake was reading such a style strained over 3 separate novels; perhaps I should have read them individually over a longer period
2) At 1185 pages (I estimate some half million words or so) with no story arc this is no War and Peace of corporate America in my view.
3) Written in 1930s well after the grit/realism of the likes of Lewis Sinclair and Frank Norris there's a lack of passion, angst or violent unfairness I'd have expected of union strikes, America's fight in WW1 and corporate greed.

Ultimately too soon I didn't care about the people depicted and their stories.

Dvaačtyřicátá rovnoběžka
Překvapivě se to vůbec nečetlo špatně. Jak jsem k té knize přistupovala s despektem (proletářský americký román), tak o to větší bylo moje překvapení. Celá první třetina je věnováno jedné postavě (Mak) a to roztříštěnost není tak cca do poloviny vůbec zřetelná. Příhody Maka jsou jak vystřižené z pikaresního románu. Ty rysy jsou i u osudů dalších postav, které si vždycky zbabrají život kvůli nějaké blbosti, ale u Maka je to nejčistčí.
Už tady se objevuje centrální postava J. Ward Moorehouse, která spojuje všechny příběhy dohromady a prolíná se celým dějem. V řadě případů jsou v náznacích vyprávěny totožné příběhy různými postavami (Eleanora x Evelina, Žany x Pepík), ale k mé lítosti toho autor nevyužil a vždy to pouze letmo přejde, takže žádné příběhy z různých úhlů pohledu se nekonají - škoda.
U životopisů jsem si musela vypomoct Wikipedií, až na pár výjimek jsem ty postavy neznala.

Kontext: Po etapě Nesbo zase jednou kniha ze série 1001, všechny díly dohromady mají rovných 1400 stran, to už je docela síla.

První věta: "Osvobozené to plémě bylo,/co na kopec útočilo,/na vraždící povstalce,/odhodlané bránit se"

Poslední věta: "Konečně Karlík pochopil, že na hlídce nesmí mluvit."


Devatenáct set devatenáct
Tenhle díl je o válce, i když přímo na bojišti se toho odehrává minimum a o řadě postav je dozvídáme pouze zprostředkovaně, co za války dělali. Z autorova vyprávění to vypadá, jakoby se všichni v US Army znali a neustále na sebe po Evropě různě naráželi, což je dost přitažené za vlasy. Větší část děje se ale stejně odehrává až po válce, během mírových rozhovorů, kde má velké slovo opět náš známý J. Ward Moorehouse a na něj se nabalují další postavy (Dick Savage, Eleanora, Žany atd.) Celým dějem ze začátku prolíná odpor k válce (je to jen boj za Morganovy půjčky), ale nakonec převáží vlastenecké nadšení a víra v americkou nadřazenost (u mírových rozhovorů jediný, kdo víc, co chce, je Wilson). Postav je v tomto dílu už hodně a místy jsem se úplně ztrácela a musela se vracet zpět, abych si našla začátky příběhů jednotlivých postav. Stále ale platí jako u prvního dílu, že vlastního štěstí se žádná postava nedobere - vždy to na něčem ztroskotá (a často si za to může ta postava sama).

Kontext: Čteno na jeden zátah po prvním dílu, někdy ale s prodlevami.

První věta: "Ó ta pěchota ta pěchota/věčně s blátem za ušima"

Poslední věta: "Woodrow Wilson přinesl kytici vlčích máků."

John dos Passos was someone who soaked himself in life. The pages of U.S.A. are brimming with it, in a simple way that breathes extraordinary observational power and storytelling sophistication. The story is clearly fueled by anger (that apparently he lost when he grew older) at the hatefulness of greed and ambition, but tempered by a wholehearted and even enthusiastic understanding of the hopelessly complex prism of drives and reactions on the personal level that lead people to prize or torment themselves and others, and ultimately help fuel injustice and oppression.

None of the characters are over-explained, they are just left to talk and do, with a real deftness of touch that for all its lightness feels cinematic. The dialogues are uncannily "true to life" to the point of often masking unheard conversation and unexplained context that has to be inferred. There are over a dozen main characters who come and go throughout the story, which switches perspective according to the protagonist at the time.

I took such a long time to get through it (in fits and starts over the space of a year) that I wish I'd made a few notes to keep names and "faces" together. Reading it through steadily would have made for a more integrated overview, but it is massive - not only in physical size but in the big spans of time and scope of action that can happen in the course of just one page. I meandered through its massiveness very very slowly: for all its apparent narrative simplicity it is plenty lyrical enough to be constantly going back a page or two and rereading, whether the "main story" bits, the cut-and-paste "newsreel" bits, or the stream-of-consciousness Beat generation "camera eye" bits. I've read complaints in other reviews about the latter two types of passage interspersed throughout, but if you love poetry, you'll love them too.

Dos Passos has as keen an eye for the natural world as for the human, and U.S.A. melds them magically together, even as most of the self-obsessed humans run through it all seemingly without a second look. There's a beauty in the writing that, like the best objets, is expressed effortlessly, even "artlessly." A random sample:
"It was a bright fall morning with blue mist in the hollows. Dry cornstalks rustled on the long hills red and yellow with fall. It was late when she got home. Dad was up reading the war news in pajamas and bathrobe. 'Well, it won't be long now, Daughter,' he said. 'The Hindenburg Line is crumpling up.'"

Finally, I learned a lot from U.S.A. about famous historical figures in U.S. history, presented in something like parable form, and brought to almost palpable life with the same quiet, patient, almost at-armslength passion that the author brings to everything else. The last tome I read having been War and Peace, it was great to read a work on a similar scale that talked a modern tongue, still as startlingly current today as it was when penned over 80 years ago.

Veblen,
a greyfaced shambling man lolling resentful at his desk with his cheek on his hand, in a low sarcastic mumble of intricate phrases subtly paying out the logical inescapable rope of matteroffact for a society to hang itself by,
dissecting out the century with a scalpel so keen, so comical, so exact that the professors adn students ninetenths of the time didn't know it was there, and the magnates and the respected windbags and the applauded loudspeakers never knew it was there.
Veblen
asked too many questions, suffered from a constitutional inability to say yes.
Socrates asked questions, drank down the bitter drink one night when the first cock crowed,
but Veblen
drank it in little sips through a long life in the stuffiness of classrooms, the dust of libraries, the staleness of cheap flats such as a poor instructor can afford. He fought the boyg all right, pedantry, routine, timeservers at office desks, trustees, collegepresidents, the pump flunkies of the ruling businessmen, all the good jobs kept for yesmen, never enough money, every broadening hope thwarted. Veblen drank the bitter drink all right.

A criminally overlooked classic. These are my favorite American novels -- the story-telling is strong, the innovation in the writing equally so. And Dos Passos, despite being a radical, shows a generosity in his writing so as to fairly portray numerous figures that he doubtless thought borderline criminal. Every person who reads American fiction should read this trilogy -- to see where it all began.