This work is a trilogy, written in the 1930's. Three novels originally published separately but essentially follow the intertwined lives of 12 characters from their childhoods in the late 1890's into the early 20th century. Dos Passos gives us a panoramic view of American life from the 1890's through the end of the 1920's. Interspersed between the narrative episodes of his characters there are "Newsreels" (consisting of headlines of contemporary events), "The Camera Eye" (stream of consciousness relaying of impressions of things going on), and little biographical sketches of prominent people of the times - Theodore Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers, J.P. Morgan and many others, all of which give flavor and historical context to his characters and their lives. We see them lived out against the background of industrial capitalism, the early labor movements (The IWW - Industrial Workers of the World) with their union organizers and socialist ideology, the entrance of America into World War I, and the Roaring Twenties and the ups and downs of investing in the Stock Market. A lot of time Dos Passos has his characters at lunch or dinner where things happen or are planned. And there is a lot of boozing throughout - the 18th Amendment which brought alcohol prohibition is never explicitly mentioned, but a lot of time is spent in the speakeasies of the 1920's. In the character of Margo Dowling we see the transition from Vaudeville to Hollywood.

All in all, a serious contender for being the Great American Novel.

This novel is the longest thing I have ever read in my life, but it is thoroughly one of the most enjoyable things I have ever read.

Dos Passos’ gift for capturing the disillusionment and ennui that accompanied the death of left-wing dreams of an equitable society is masterful, and his skillful portrayal of the corruption invoked by capitalism within the American continent is beautiful.

The novel has one flaw, its vitriolic racism, and it’s failure to portray America through the lens of any characters of color. In every other regard it stands as a titan, towering above similar lost generation authors.

1919 in particular is beautifully heart-wrenching, and the ending of The Big Money is perfectly done, in capturing the cynicism inevitable to American life.

I truly cannot recommend this book enough.

The USA TrilogyttttJohn Dos Passos (1930-1936) #23


The 42nd Parallel
March 22, 2013

tWhoever picked these books for the Modern Library list had a GIANT boner for Marx, communism and the worker’s struggle. I have learned more about the IWW and the Marxist movement and brotherhood than I have ever cared to know. The interesting thing about these books is that they open my eyes to see the history of unified labor (i.e. modern political communism), and understand that the “system” that people bitch about. It seems then, as now, the people that are pro-communism and “united labor” talk and wring their hands about problems of “free speech” and “worker’s rights”, then make poor life decisions that doom them to the “working class”. That, or they are hypothetical academics. Either way, I’m sick of hearing about their ideas that don’t work. You know what gets you ahead in life more than anything else? Personal responsibility, that’s what. The main characters in this book (for the most part) end up bumming around, stealing shit, dropping out of school, knocking up girls, then leaving because they feel trapped by the system. They trap themselves. You can’t have individual freedom without accountability.

1919
April 6, 2013

tI found this particular book to be more disjointed than the first. I have read three books during the reading of this and fell asleep reading it (and not even in bed) on four occasions. 1919 focused a bit more on the capitalist aspect (sort of) of one of the main characters, but still relied heavily on the “world revolution” theme so prevalent in the first novel. Another continued theme in this book is that most of the male characters knock up their girlfriends and then either a) force them to get abortions, or b) leave them. Take this particular example from a character that I liked at first, but ends up being just as despicable as almost every other character encountered so far in this book. He is named Richard Savage (all parentheses are mine):

“He thought of Anne Elizabeth (the girl he knocked up) going home alone in a taxicab through the wet streets. He wished he had a great many lives so that he might have spent one of them with Anne Elizabeth. Might write a poem about that and send it to her. And the smell of the little cyclamens. In the café opposite the waiters were turning the chairs upside down and setting them on tables. He wished he had a great many lives so that he might be a waiter in a café turning the chairs upside down.”

What an asshole. What a savage dick. I just ruined your life – maybe I’ll write you a poem about my ambiguous notions that if there were multiple “me’s”, I might do the right things, but if there were multiple “me’s”, I might also be a waiter. By the way, nice fucking flowers.

Just a bit earlier in the book he tells her:
“…it’s no more my fault than it is yours…if you’d taken proper precautions…”

All the protagonists in this book suck.

The Big Money
June 6, 2013

You know what – it has taken me so long to get through this book that it is almost impossible to put it all together in a review. I don’t know if it would have come together anyway. The story line was so weak that this just felt like random essays and Dos Passos trying to tie up loose ends (poorly).
tThe only interesting part of this whole trilogy happened in this particular installment, and that was the wrapping up of the Charley Anderson story. With a bit more creativity, that might have even redeemed this last book, but it seemed to me that in the end it still somehow managed to fall a bit flat. Then the story jumps right in to a minor character and proceeds to get boring again.
tI honestly had to power my way through this book and it was quite a test of patience for me. While the writing style was easy to understand, it seemed like in the Camera Eye and Newsreel snippets that punctured this story Dos Passos tried too hard to be an experimental writer. Instead of adding the intended color to the series, most of the time it bogged down a story that was already mired in literary muck. Yuck, Meh, and further indifference.

3.5

Absolute monster of a book

I had mixed feelings about it at times and it was definitely a slog to get through in parts, but now that it's over I can't help but love USA. It's unlike any other book I've read and paints a really comprehensive picture of an America that I've never really learnt about before - a much more socialist America (and an even more heavy drinking America) than I'd ever known.

It's got its flaws though. I love the use of four different narrative modes in the book, it makes the portrait of America feel much more textured than if it were just a traditionally told story, I just wish the mode you spend the bulk of the time reading was as interesting to read as the other three! The stream of consciousness in the Camera Eye sections is obtuse as balls, but it all adds up to an incredibly visceral political coming of age story; the Newsreel sections where Dos Passos makes collages out of news articles, headlines, songs and ads from the era are hard to make sense of when you have as little historical background as me, but they're so cool and make the scope of the book feel so much broader; the biographies of notable Americans are maybe the best of the bunch and they show that Dos Passos can tell a coherent account of someone's life in a stylistically interesting and understandable way (the biographies of unnamed citizens that close out Nineteen Nineteen and The Big Money are probably the best sections of the book). But then you spend 90% of the time reading perfectly well written accounts of fictional characters lives that just feel so much more dull in comparison. And these stories aren't particularly satisfying in the traditional sense, major events happen with very little build up and they are populated with so many characters that are often given so little space to develop its hard to keep track of them (especially all the men in Nineteen Nineteen). This structure makes sense looking at the book from a distance - the grounded realism and rapid shifts in the narratives are there because that's what the book's trying to show you a reality where Americans lead unstable lives with little or no control. The book probably wouldn't work without it, it's just a shame it can be a bit of a slog to get through.

I don't want to seem like I secretly hate this book and am just giving it 5 stars on prestige alone. It was a difficult read and I didn't always enjoy it, but USA deserves its reputation. Over its three volumes it builds up the strongest, clearest and most powerful message of anger at America and capitalism I've seen in any book (and maybe any thing?), all while highlighting members of American society I've never read about before. It may not be the most fun book whilst reading, but I'll be thinking about and dipping back into USA for a long time.

btw The Big Money is the best volume

The 42nd Parallel (4-star)
I really enjoyed this part of the trilogy. It's well written and shows the life, struggles & times in the USA at the turn of the century to WWI.
These characters stem from the working class. They all struggle for comfort, stability, security. The struggles are real. Jobs are lost, bosses take liberties, landlords ask high rents for squalid conditions. It's a hand to mouth existence that all the characters want to leave behind.
Very socialist. I hadn't realized the USA was so socialist at this time. The people can see that their labours and hardships bring wealth to their bosses and their companies. Change is coming....now the war has come to the USA. Will that change the coming change?
Looking forward to the next book in the trilogy.

1919 (3-star)
Much different in tone than the first book. There's a somberness throughout of futility, boredom and an unfocussed look at one's future. The World is at war. That would make one's future unfocussed and uncertain and perhaps one would try to find superficial "joys" wherever one can. But it doesn't make for an interesting story.
I enjoyed some parts of this part of the trilogy but, all in all, this is a dull story that really doesn't go anywhere. Like the characters in this story, we readers are also waiting for the end of the war and this wait is full of dullness. We also take our pleasure in the few short sections of interesting story-line.
Onwards to the third part of the trilogy.

The Big Money (2 star)
Well times have changed. The USA is rolling in money. Fortunes are to be had.
But our characters fail to grab on to any of it for any length of time. How distressing! Thing is......while this trilogy is supposedly a segment of American Life & History and shows changing, revolutionary, economically secure times, these people make their own problems and lose every brass ring being hung before them. These people make their own problems and never seem to learn, hence only repeating the same problems again and again.

The Trilogy (3 star)
As a whole, this is an interesting read.
There are three sections to most chapters:
1. News clips taken from actual newspapers. These give an idea of the changes happening in the country surrounding the characters. Some of these news clips can cause one to go down rabbit holes to search out the original story (ie: the Pig Lady)
2. Camera Eye: a stream of consciousness method of writing telling a life of what is supposedly based on the author's life. Mostly not necessary to the novel but interesting for itself.
3. The story of a character. Reading about these people is like watching a train wreck happening.

Popped in between a few of the chapters is a history of a famous person. These were interesting; a lifetime in a few pages. A life boiled down to basics. Some persons included are: Henry Ford, Rudolf Valentino, Thomas Edison, Isadora Duncan.

The trilogy offers a great variety of characters, each moving upon a different social level but all presented within the limits of a single world. The result is a complete cross-section of American life covering the political, social, and economic history of the United States from the beginning of the 20C to the Depression-ridden, war-threatened 1930s. In addition to the life stories of his characters, Dos Passos provides "Newsreels" (quotations from newspapers, speeches, and popular songs), "The Camera Eye" (brief impressionistic sketches of the author's own life), and "Biographies" (portraits of such public figures as radicals, inventor and politicians).

antesignano il padre dei romanzi mondo... Il primo romanzo al quale è stata data la definizione di grande romanzo americano... In Italia e soprattutto in America non ha avuto vita facile a causa di idee alquanto pericolose per l'epoca


leggetelo

Re-read the USA Trilogy, which is such an ambitious book and not well enough known these days. Dos Passos had a grand vision for content and style. In my view, he wanted to present the sweep of events and characters that would create the U.S.A. of the 20th century. A big theme, and one that influenced me in the 60's, is the tension between labor and capital. He began pre-WWI in the first book of the trilogy, The 49th Parallel, and continued through the war until a few years after it. The result is a mosaic of news events, popular songs, short biographies of characters who shaped the times, like Eugene Debs, Robert La Follette, Thomas Edison, a continuing stream of consciousness autobiography, and the developing stories of various characters, working men and women, businessmen, politicians, journalists. It's lively and amazingly pertinent.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Upon finishing the third of the three novels, I could not help but draw parallels between the time in which the books were set (and written,) the early 20th century, and now, the early 21st century. As my 11th grade English teacher noted, "humanity's circumstances will always be different, but the human condition never changes."

I can't say the novels that make up this trilogy are an easy read, nor did I find them particularly enjoyable, but I am glad that I read them. The first and last books are noticeably better than the second, but all three are priceless in their observations and as a refresher on early 20th century history.

It was, for me, particularly interesting to note that the passions and idealism of youth tend to be pretty much now what they were then. Also, the Newsreel sections reminded me that, while I often believe our society is going to hell in a hand-basket, so too did anyone reading the headlines in the early 20th century, and for mostly the same reasons.

I started reading U.S.A. by John Dos Passos because it is the book most often included on lists of Great American Novels that I see read the least. I was delighted to find that this is primarily for two reasons: it is very long and it is extremely leftist.

If I have to think of a precursor to the three smaller novels that comprise U.S.A., I would probably think of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." Like "Winesburg" the novel is broken into chapters with varying protagonists and points of view. Unlike "Winesburg" many of the chapters have recurring chapters, so the film is like numerous small novels and novellas combined together more than it is a short story collection.

The variety of protagonists allows Dos Passos to feature characters that you don't often see taking center-stage in a novel: an itinerant laborer who becomes a revolutionary, a female union organizer, a Ziegfeld girl turned starlet, and a Red Cross volunteer sent home after he evolves leftist leanings to name a few. These varied protagonists are accompanied by "newsreel" sections that remind the reader of events of the day, "camera eye" sections that place the reader in various situations that take place around the country, and short biographies of famed figures of the day that provide a decidedly left-leaning context for the era (pre-WWI through the roaring 20s).

This structure is in itself a kind of praxis, asserting that to tell the story of America, one must tell many stories, and those many stories will largely be found among the working class. And with his repeated admiring references to Marx, Debs, Bill Haywood, industrial strikes, the I.W.W., the American Communist Party, and many other American leftist elements, we have to imagine that this was supremely intentional.

Perhaps one reason this book has fallen into relative obscurity is that Dos Passos ended his life as a Goldwater and Nixon supporter following disillusion with the American left. It is hard to believe that that later man and this one are one and the same. Though his characters are sometimes critical of the left, the critique feels more like that tossed off by a Jacobin writer or DSA organizer of today than someone who will wholly forsake the left. Here his critiques are about means and not ends. That being said, the tendency of idealistic leftist characters to come to ruin while capitalist characters like the centrist-liberal PR man at the center of much of the action may have foreshadowed some of the pain Dos Passos would come to feel with the distance between leftist idealism and reality.

I think readers will find that there are remarkable political parallels between the era and communities Dos Passos chronicles in this book. Perhaps the American left can reclaim Dos Passos' work and place U.S.A. among the few American novels that are written from an explicitly socialist perspective that are also extremely good.

I loved this book. Dos Passos is seriously neglected these days, but his techniques (newsreels!) and characters are amazing.

Need to get another copy of this, stat.

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 stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western 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 bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms 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.
—p.3

You won't find a single straight story here, although there are some threads that run through the whole work. If you're looking for a simple "Once upon a time..." that speeds without swerving all the way through to "...happily ever after," then look elsewhere. All is chaos and rumble in U.S.A.—voices leaking through from a spinning radio dial; newsreels whose very nouns are dust from our perspective a century along... but John Dos Passos brings them all to sweaty, frenetic life in this amazing and enduring book.

U.S.A. is actually a trilogy—its individual volumes are The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money—but it has been available as a single edition since the 1930s, and its components really do blend into a nearly seamless whole which is well served by the Library of America edition I read. I will be referring to it in the singular throughout this review.

*

I first became aware of U.S.A. through its imitators... in particular, through John Brunner's landmark sf novel Stand on Zanzibar, which absorbed, altered and re-emitted its structure in order to portray a dystopian future, and more recently via David Brin's reference to it in his novel Existence. But this is the original, the pure quill; it carries the freshness of discovery and the weight of history.

There are plenty of history-makers, in fact, whose brief biographies grace these pages... take for example this poetic epitaph for Andrew Carnegie:

Andrew Carnegie gave millions for peace
and libraries and scientific institutes and endowments and thrift
whenever he made a billion dollars he endowed an institution to promote universal peace
always
except in time of war.
—p.231

But like a fictionalized version of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, U.S.A. focuses mostly on working-class protagonists: ordinary people in modest roles. Dos Passos' camera eye roams like a literary Robert Altman's, over mechanics and dressmakers, labor activists and drunken aviators, ambitious men and women and those just trying to get by. They have their own voices, these poetically-minded publicity consultants and demure personal assistants. It feels like time travel—You Are There. And much of the power of his prose comes directly from Dos Passos' ear for vernacular—that "speech of the people."

There's a downside to that accurate ear, though. Dos Passos was, to the extent that it's possible to divine his own views from his fiction (always a mug's game), only interested in describing, not condemning, any particular race, religion, gender or orientation—but in so doing, he reproduces not just the cadences of ordinary speech but also its evils. Dos Passos' diversity of voices does not extend to those of African-Americans, Asians and Native Americans, for example, who are rarely if ever heard from directly, and the vilest of pejoratives aimed at these groups and others fall all too easily from the lips of his all-white protagonists. Nevertheless, Dos Passos' own sympathies always seem to lie with the persecuted, not their persecutors.

The role—or perhaps a better word would be "plight"—of women in U.S.A. is similarly problematic, but again that seems to be more a matter of description than prescription. Dos Passos does in fact devote many chapters to strong and memorable women like stenographer Janey Williams, decorator Eveline Hutchins and social activist Mary French... but even so they are largely defined by their relationships to men—sexual, romantic and occasionally even otherwise. Dos Passos writes unflinchingly of seductions ("making love" meant, at the time, not just intercourse but the flirting, persuasion and caresses that lead up to the act) and their aftermath—from pregnancies to gonorrhea. Men and women were as sex-mad in the early 1900s as in any era, of course—but the near-total absence of reliable contraception and of safe ways to terminate an unplanned pregnancy (abortions don't stop being needed just because they're illegal or stigmatized; they just get harder to obtain) made for a huge disparity in the power relationships between sexes.

Dos Passos is also unafraid to explore the underside of American politics, the way groupthink and the pressure of public opinion work to suppress dissent even in a society that supposedly reveres its Bill of Rights. He relays with great sympathy the pacifist and isolationist views of the people who tried to keep the United States out of World War I, and the punishments they received for expressing their unpopular views in the face of the unstoppable drums of war. It's instructive to read this work after experiencing George W. Bush's presidency... despite the manifold and very real inroads on freedom made during the Dubya years, the crackdown on anti-war speech during WWI was even more brutal and draconian.

Dos Passos held a dim view of Adolf Hitler, too—his passing reference to "Handsome Adolf" in The Big Money is clearly sarcastic—long before der Führer's impact on history was clear to most others.

The American Plan; automotive prosperity seeping down from above; it turned out there were strings to it.
—p.809

In economics, too, Dos Passos shows his analytic skills as well as his regard for the underdog. It's hard to imagine now just how incredibly brutal American working-class life was before World War I, but Dos Passos observes and reports with clinical precision on how union activism was suppressed without mercy. Despite repeating clever slurs like "I. Won't. Work," for the most part his perspective remains liberal, even socialist—the Industrial Workers of the World, to give them their proper name, come across as valiant victims fighting a doomed rear-guard action against the owners and managers of the great industrial concerns—steel, oil, coal, rail—who became so wealthy while their workers bled and starved. It's no wonder that talk of a socialist revolution was so serious here before, and after, the distraction of the Great War. U.S.A. does mention, but underplays, the role that concessions from corporate owners, however grudging, and the general rise in prosperity of the U.S., had in defusing the tensions that had seemed so likely to lead to bloody revolution in this country.

And, actually, the I.W.W. are still around.

*

A side note on a possible soundtrack for reading this book: I found that U.S.A. goes down well when mixed with the warm, intimate Americana of Athens, Georgia, band Bloodkin's 25-year, 5-disc retrospective One Long Hustle. (Why, yes, I do have a personal connection to the band—I used to play bass with a couple of 'em, back in the day, and my name appears within the booklet that's part of this box set.)

Sometimes Dos Passos himself waxes lyrical:

[...]the sky is lined with greenbacks
the riveters are quiet the trucks of the producers are shoved off onto the marginal avenues
winnings sing from every streetcorner
—"The Camera Eye (46)", p.894

or

The funeral train arrived in Hollywood on page 23 of the New York Times.
—p.930

*

[...]To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson. "Ulysses"

I think I remember picking up this book once before, long ago, and bouncing off of it without even coming close to finishing. It may be that you need to have a certain perspective, a weight of years or experience, before U.S.A. makes sense. It can be a daunting endeavor at times. It took me a long time to read this volume (and a longer time than usual for me to write this review)—but there's no doubt in my mind that this is a master work, well worth the effort.