An overview into the lives of twelve characters who live in the US around the beginning of the 20th century. Some of them know each other and that is part of it's charm, seeing how these people touch on each other.
Some are sucessful, some aren't and there is both joy and tragedy throughout the book, a book which I found through reading the 1001 list.

As far as opuses go, U.S.A. is probably about as good as they come. The problem is, I'm not sure how much demand there is for an opus these days. Contemporary readers love quantity, form, repetition (see: Harry Potter, Twilight, Game of Thrones, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) - when duly monetized and adaptable for film. But we, as a people, may be turning our back on the Tolstoys and Joyces and Dos Passoses of yesteryear.

I think the reason is pretty simple. The opus, grand as it is, contains a lot of cellulose that we don't make active metabolic use of. Thankfully, U.S.A. isn't as undigestible as Ulysses. But it still spends plenty of time on gibberish that, frankly, I don't see how to extract anything nutritive from. Maybe I've got a low patience threshhold for gibberish, but I found it expedient to bypass all of the "Camera Eye" segments altogether. The "Newsreel" segments were a little better, but that's probably due to my history degree (meaning I have a slight advantage contextualizing the collage). I can imagine other readers throwing their hands up in exasperation. We've forgotten the turn of the century popular verse, the yellow news slang is now arcane, and not everyone properly contextualizes Wilson's New Freedom.

So, U.S.A. suffers from the limitations of its modern audience. The format is arguably dying and the (then revolutionary) experimentation comes across as pretentious. The copious use of make-believe, justplainsilly compound adjectives is tiresome. But one thing works unusually well in a convention that our generation understands, but Dos Passos couldn't have imagined. Since the story arc is told in vignettes, with distinct voices, the books can read almost like anthologies. The really effective vignettes (like "The Body of an American" which ends 1919 and "Vag" which ends the whole work) are like exceptional songs in a really big box set. Likewise, periods in certain characters' lives can be dissected from their lives as a whole - and the intersection of those lives with the lives of others - and enjoyed á la carte. I wouldn't go as far as to say one can just pick up U.S.A., turn to a random selection, and blow a quarter of an hour the way one does, say, a poetry anthology. It still needs to be read cover-to-cover. But moving beyond fixation on continuity and reducing the focus to the individual piece makes more enjoyable work of digesting the 1200 or so pages of this baby.

I confess, my underlying reason for reading U.S.A. was to be able to say I had (isn't that the same reason we read Ulysses or War and Peace outside of school?). But unlike other things I read for the same disingenuous reason, U.S.A. was pretty goddamn enjoyable. Despite the gripes I have with it, there are so many slick licks peppered throughout that you find your head sort of bobbing along in time when Dos Passos really gets rocking. Putting William Jennings Bryan poolside and throwing in a cameo by Houdini might be as gimmicky as harmonized guitars in a Boston song, but damn if it doesn't tickle our guilty pleasure.

Rereading the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos starting with the 42nd parallel. I remember being blown away by the book when I first read it as a teenager. It holds up very well as a kalidescope picture of the country in the years running up to World War I . A series of very loosely connected characters interspersed with short bios of notable figures from labor leaders to capitalists to politicians and further bracketed by newsreel sections. The collage helps to capture an era with characters being buffeted by events. One of the chapters, a wobbly, is a typesetter just like my Dad; one of the characters is from Georgetown and he describes Washington D C with a knowing eye as befits a graduate o St Albans. In another scene, there is a meal at Luchows which I remember well as my Dad would make it a point to have a meal underneath the raised Christmas tree they had there during the holidays. I also recalled a scene where a woman is walking with an impressionable and naive young man in Ocean City Maryland of all places. It is evening and the girl daringly takes off her clothes to run into the surf for a late night skinny dip. I remember being as shocked as the character in the book by the audacity of this gesture. Highly recommended

U.S.A. was the trilogy that put Dos Passos on the map in the 1930s and made him the darling of every critic from the New Republic to the Daily Worker. Its an overtly Left-wing political novel, telling the story of America during the first years of the 20th century. We get the "Camera's Eye", "Newsreels" and mini-biographies of historical figures. And the stories of 12 major characters.

The problem is the 12 major characters are just political stick figures. When I finished this huge novel, they all blended together. This is a message novel, not Great Literature. Later, Dos Passos would attack the Communist Party and eventually move on to attack Big Government for its dehumanizing affect on the average man. Needless to say, the same critics who loved "USA" hated all his succeeding novels.

My advice is read all mini-biographies and newreels and skip everything else.

This is the Great American Novel Trilogy. Innovative structure even for today (storytelling through vignettes as well as straight narration). Just an incredible, involving, sweeping epic depiction of the U.S. in the 20's (wobblies, Fighting Bob Lafollette, unions, everything and everyone, no joke). From the snapshots and the fragments from various characters' POV emerges a portrait of our country that is unforgettable. This, for me, is a desert island book. I could read it hundreds of times and find fresh delights. Why oh why do we have to read Ethan Frome and Old Man and the Sea in high school for God's sake but not this?! SOOOOOO good.

I can see why this has a strong claim to be “The Great American Novel.” (Technically it is three novels, but they are all so closely connected that it feels like one vast and complex unity). It is certainly very absorbing, and much better than Manhattan Transfer – which was also quite impressive, but now feels like the author was just flexing his muscles before he really got going with this one. There is a powerful sense of that strange and peculiar place that is the United States – a place which I have only visited once, but where I certainly felt that odd mixture of attraction and repulsion which Dos Passos seems to have felt too.

It has often been said that reading can be a way to live multiple lives in one, and I certainly felt that here. But there are some weaknesses. There is a lot of fairly simplistic socialist propaganda and this grates quite a lot because every left wing character is a goody and every right wing character is a baddie. This I think is the biggest flaw of the novel and, I believe, something which the author later came to acknowledge as well. It makes a lot of the characterisation seem a bit childish and one dimensional when everything is refracted through the prism of propaganda.

Nevertheless, this is a remarkable achievement and gave me a real sense of the beauty and the sorrow of the lived experience of winners and losers in twentieth century America. It’s also an epic which is easily digestible: I found none of it boring, and was enjoyably absorbed in these pages for many hours at a stretch. I read it all in less than a week (admittedly I lead a quiet and undemanding life).

K, woah. This dude weaved first and third person narratives, headlines, lyrics, famous speeches, and created a fragmented essay that made me feel like I was on the front steps of Washington, someone in the "history books" as a protestor "scrawled on the margins in pencil." Reading this wild fragmented technique was an experience in how fragmented Dos Passos's America had become.

American history aside, this guy was a serious innovative impressionist and was quite the trip to read, kicking grammar to the curb and giving us line breaks--as if we deserved yet MORE poetic techniques.

At times, the fragments were kinda too fragmented and unclear; but he had very little example to model his technique from. And now, today's writers model their spoken word and memoirs after THIS GUY. Will read again and talk about it at parties.

Loved this part: Our main dude hitchhikes across the U.S. and vomits his New York steak in Las Vegas, because well, there are "plenty restaurants in L.A." Get this guy a Netflix special.

fav quote:
"the beaten streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to burned we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crown the we sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes a the coffins we stand defeated America" (author's punctuation)

Oh, and when he called the dead bodies of soldiers "enie menie minie moe[s]." Wow.

I've been reading this for nearly 9 years. Now I am done and feel like a real American. And in a way that I alone have discovered what it means to be a true American. The series ends phenominally and I can't believe I ever wrote it off as mumbo jumbo that doesn't necessarily need to be read the whole way through. I don't know what I'm going to read next, but this was fucking fantastic. All hail Simon Joyce for assigning the first book. And our trip to New York to study modernity.

U.S.A. is a trilogy of 3 novels that tops out at 1,240 pages in the Library of America edition. The way the novels flow straight into each other, if you didn't know these were 3 separate novels written a few years' apart from each other, you would think this was just one huge novel. The subject of the novel is exactly the title: U.S.A. in the time period before, during and immediately after World War I. The introductory couple of pages by the author in describing a kind of "everyman" experiencing life in America, is an excellent prelude to the stories that follow.
This novel is very unique in its format. There are about 12 main characters that you meet throughout the novel. The book is broken up into sections of maybe 15-30 pages at a time (varies pretty widely), of which each section focuses on the story of one of these 12 main characters. In between a slice one character's life and the next, there is a "Newsreel" section of 1-2 pages of news headlines clipped from newspapers of the time, along with a shorter, more stream-of-consciousness section of about 1 page called "The Camera Eye", which seems to be focused on the recent location and subject matter of the immediately preceding character's section. Maybe about 1/3 to halfway through the entire book, I realized that the main characters' stories start to intertwine with each other. Not all characters have a meaningful relationship or lasting impact on each other; some do, although most are just on the same boat or bump into another character as a matter of business. The way the characters' lives intertwine is very masterfully written by Mr. Dos Passos.
The primary themes of the novel are: socialism, communism, the Russian Revolution of 1917, World War I, President Woodrow Wilson, unions, labor, with some undertones of class disparity, race relations, women's suffrage, gender relations, abortion, sex, poverty and wealth.
The book is kind of like a reality television show following people around during the 1910s in America. Primarily, the characters are bad apples, and some meet an untimely demise within the pages of the novel.
So much of the focus of this novel is on socialism and "social justice". It was ironic to me that I was reading this book during 2020, when socialism is touted by many as a better way of governing America and making things more equitable for the middle class, supposedly. It was hard for me to tell if Mr. Dos Passos is a sympathizer with the socialists and I.W.W. members of the novel, but based upon the chronology in the rear of the novel, I would say that he was. The novel gives the reader some perspective on how difficult life was for the average workingman during the 1910s in America. Unions were striking for better wages, benefits and a more reasonable 8-hour workday, things that we might take for granted today. Wages were very low and the work was often backbreaking in the factories and industries of the day. With the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act, the First Amendment Rights of many were under siege. This made it extremely dangerous for the socialists and communists of the novel to rebel and speak up against the government and the market forces keeping their wages down and their hours up.
One thing I really liked about this book is that the characters think for themselves and don't all have completely self-destructive tendencies like some of the other American novels I have read that take place in the 1940s-1950s. As a reader, I found myself rooting for some of the characters in the novel.
Something that really surprised me about this novel was the debased lifestyle of nearly all the Americans described in the novel. Premarital sex was the norm, men asked women to marry them without a meaningful proposal in nearly every case (it seemed to be more of a marriage of convenience than for love), women had a hard time getting an abortion and when they did it was often very unsafe or involved drinking castor oil, everyone drinks A LOT and smokes a lot too. I wonder if this book was considered scandalous during the time it was published because of the subject matter and the promiscuous lifestyles of the characters?
The descriptions of the strikers and labor unions and protesters being beaten and abused, sometimes murdered, jailed, derided by the police and the common folk made me feel somewhat depressed and hopeless. I was very interested to see Eugene V. Debs mentioned several times throughout the book as a prominent figure in the socialistic movement during that time period, and running for President of the United States on 3 separate occasions. As a grade school student in Terre Haute, Indiana, I wrote a book report on Mr. Debs and thought of him as a kindly old man who gave up most of the prime of his adult life to fighting for workers' rights, and being jailed for it.
I would recommend that if you read this book, you commit to reading it in 2 months or less. I think with the way the plot twists and switches between various characters and everything going on, the novel has more of an effect upon the reader of just how hectic and crazy and uncertain this time period was for most Americans. I do think that there is an undue emphasis placed upon the largest metropolitan cities in America: New York City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, etc., and not on the rural areas. However, you can read 'Main Street' by Upton Sinclair to get an idea of what was going on in the suburbs. I think the author's main point in this novel is to just drown the reader in the chaos and sensuousness, longing and despair, joy with fleeting happiness, wealth, sin and debauchery going on in the States during this time, while seeing middle class families and working men trying to make ends meet and taking risks to join labor unions to stick up for their rights. It is a VERY powerful novel and I found it to be very moving, and got me thinking about how many things in my career that I take for granted, that men and women had to struggle for in order for me to benefit from - 5-day work week with 8 hour days, decent wages, etc.
I enjoyed this book so much, that I hope to come back to read another novel by Mr. Dos Passos at some point in the future.

This is indeed a truly great American novel.

I used to hate studying history. I get it now.

This is a massive book, and John Dos Passos seems to know every nook and cranny of the lives of the people he is writing about - the "little people", those who are cheated and betrayed by the system. A whole patchwork of characters, a panorama of a nation over the first quarter of the 20th century. It is actually, I think, a mistake to try to read it all in one go - far too much for an ordinary brain to take in.