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The U.S.A. Trilogy #3

The Big Money

john dos passos

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The Big Money completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" ( American Heritage ) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" ( Time ).

Here we come back to America after the war and find a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms. The stock market surges. Lindbergh takes his solo flight. Henry Ford makes automobiles. From New York to Hollywood, love affairs to business deals, it is a country taking the turns too fast, speeding toward the crash of 1929.

Ultimately, whether the novels are read together or separately, they paint a sweeping portrait of collective America and showcase the brilliance and bravery of one of its most enduring and admired writers.

“It is not simply that [Dos Passos] has a keen eye for people, but that he has a keen eye for so many different kinds of people.” — New York Times

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1936
Series
The U.S.A. Trilogy
Places
the united states of america, 

This edition

Format
464 pages, Paperback
Published
May 25, 2000 by Mariner Books Classics
ISBN
9780618056835
ASIN
0618056831
Language
English

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About the author

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john dos passos

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John Roderigo Dos Passos, son of John Randolph Dos Passos, was an American novelist and artist.

He received a first-class education at The Choate School, in Connecticut, in 1907, under the name John Roderigo Madison. Later, he traveled with his tutor on a tour through France, England, Italy, Greece and the Middle East to study classical art, architecture and literature.

In 1912 he attended Harvard University and, after graduating in 1916, he traveled to Spain to continue his studies. In 1917 he volunteered for the Sanitary Squad Unit 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with Edward Estlin Cummings and Robert Hillyer.

By the late summer of 1918, he had completed a draft of his first novel and, at the same time, he had to report for duty in the United States Army Medical Corps, in Pennsylvania.
When the war was over, he stayed in Paris, where the United States Army Overseas Education Commission allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne.

Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, titled One Man's Initiation: 1917, followed by an antiwar story, Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition. His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer was a success.

In 1937 he returned to Spain with Hemingway, but the views he had on the Communist movement had already begun to change, which sentenced the end of his friendship with Hemingway and Herbert Matthews.

In 1930 he published the first book of the U.S.A. trilogy, considered one of the most important of his works.

Only thirty years later would John Dos Passos be recognized for his significant contribution in the literary field when, in 1967, he was invited to Rome to accept the prestigious Antonio Feltrinelli Prize.

Between 1942 and 1945, Dos Passos worked as a journalist covering World War II and, in 1947, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tragedy struck when an automobile accident killed his wife, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. He remarried to Elizabeth Hamlyn Holdridge in 1949, with whom he had an only daughter, Lucy Dos Passos, born in 1950.

Over his long and successful carreer, Dos Passos wrote forty-two novels, as well as poems, essays and plays, and created more than four hundred pieces of art.

The John Dos Passos Prize is a literary award given annually by the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University. The prize seeks to recognize "American creative writers who have produced a substantial body of significant publication that displays characteristics of John Dos Passos' writing: an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental approach to form, and an interest in a wide range of human experiences."

As an artist, Dos Passos created his own cover art for his books, influenced by modernism in 1920s Paris. He died in Baltimore, Maryland. Spence's Point, his Virginia estate, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1971.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
34(34%)
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99 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
AppaTico
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Não sei se é a Grande Novela Americana, como tentam vender, talvez seja a maior novela americana que pouca gente leu. Eu mesmo achei muito por acaso. Curti a capa numa livraria em meados de 2009, e vi as aspas colocando essa trilogia acima dos trabalhos do Faulkner e do Hemingway, mas foi só ao ler um pedaço que me encantei. Um trabalho semi-experimental junto com um spam de tempo de décadas. Só li o primeiro em 2014, achei um tanto lento, demorado. Em 2017 li o segundo e voltei a me encantar. É mesmo lento, mas acho que é uma leitura para ser feita sem pressa, por um longo tempo. Vale muito a pena.
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kwk47
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I think “The Big Money” is the best of the “U.S.A.” trilogy (which includes “The 42nd Parallel” and “1919”). I’m not sure if that’s because of the book itself or because of the way reading it with recollection of the prior (which I read in succession just before it) pulls the entire work together.

Essentially, this is the great American epic; “U.S.A.” is actually a perfect overall title. It is, quite literally, the story of life in the USA. It focuses on three decades, the 1900s, the 1910s, and the 1920s in a way that could have been the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s; the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, or any period of time (or more than three decades if an author would have the wherewithal to do it). What’s most significant is something some of the less favorable reviews missed; this is timeless, not dated. Once you tune into the grand scheme, its easy as you read to envision the whole thing being re-told with details from today.

The scheme for the work is subtle and fascinating. At first, I wondered about Do Passos’ seeming focus on one strata of society, the marginal or disaffected. But after having finished the trilogy, I now get it. I find it almost analogous to the scientific method, where you want to observe the impact of X on Y but you want to control for variations in A, B, C, etc. Each decade has its own flavor; the 1900s dominated by class strife and the emergence of the labor movement fading, as it ends, toward the theme of the next decade, which is the Great War, patriotism and loyalty with undercurrents of class struggle persisting (we see even now these underlays as the flavor of one decade doesn’t fully end on the exact last date of that decade) and we see themes of the next decade (money, ambition, partying) taking shape. We also see the variety of ways these larger historical and institutional forces play out on a variety of individuals who start out more or less from the same point but wind up pursuing different paths and reaching different destinations based on – well, I suppose that’s for us to figure out and debate; Innate characteristics? Small variations in environmental details? Luck? All of the above? Some of the above? And by the way, as we get this high-level big-picture vantage point, it’s hard not to notice the workings of the old adage, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Parallels from what we saw then to what we see today are hard not to notice if one can avoid getting too wrapped up in details.

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KyleScouter
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I enjoyed this book for the most part, I really felt like I was there with each character's point of view and going through life with them. I really like history so I felt more into this book because of that. The way this book was set up was very unique and something I had never really seen to that level before. The author created news articles that were placed at random points throughout the book. I didn’t necessarily like them, it seemed sort of annoying to have to cut me off from the reading the main story line. I really enjoyed the main storyline told from Charley Anderson, and going through his struggles and his successes to try to make it in America after World War l. I really didn’t like when the author would abruptly stop the main story line to cut to another storyline told from another perspective, it really was frustrating to me, and didn’t make me interested in reading more. The other perspectives weren’t as intriguing to me. Once the main storyline was back I was happy again. I found the language to be very easy to read, and felt like I could go through each page fairly quickly, which I really like in books. I also felt like I learned a lot about New York, and the United States during the 1920’s, and how challenging it was to make a living and trying to support others at the sametime. Overall I thought it was an alright book, with a very great main storyline.
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zztl9
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Great ending to the USA Trilogy, which got better and better as it progressed. The only flaw in this volume is the Margo Dowling storyline, which I didn’t find as fully realized as the others. Camera Eye 50, Dos Passos’ prose poem about the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, is one of the best things I’ve ever read about coming to grips with political defeat.
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wazzupabby
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A tough read, but worthwhile. The stream of consciousness news reels and Snapshot interludes were annoying for me, but I enjoyed the stories of the three main characters, as well as the bits about people like frank Lloyd Wright, who were important in that era.
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howdoyouhavetime
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Re The USA Trilogy. I found this plotless depiction of Dos Passo's fictional characters set during the 1st three decades of the 20th century to be fascinating. The author reveals everyday people of almost all stripes, during a time of momentous change in the country as well as the world, and shows how they simply cope with their lives, and how they try to make it in an America that was full of opportunity, but yet, still full of the vicissitudes life always presents - the inevitable disappointments, heartbreaks, frustrations and difficulties that everyone faces, no matter how hard we all try to avoid them.
Especially interesting to me was just the way it seems so many people at that time lived, scrambling to be 'successful', while apparently not ever thinking too much about what that meant. And no PC stuff here, people just did and said whatever they thought, as long as it seemed, they were accompanied by prodigious amounts of booze to help them along the way. Essentially, this is a snapshot of a way of life long gone in America's history. Again, it was fascinating to experience it, even vicariously.
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Lools
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I can only add my voice to the the chorus of approval that greets this book. Elegant, economical, with the crystal clarity of description we expect from writing of this era, The Big Money evokes the minutiae of American life between the wars in unrelenting detail. The rain, the gambling, the drinking, the rain, the dismal insecurity of it all play out in a collage of news headlines, popular songs and the stories of 'a basket of deplorables' who struggle against the times and their own natures to somehow keep their foothold in a world of cheap rooms, seedy bars and empty pockets. Nobody keeps a job for long, hopes are inevitably dashed, families fail, romance barely surfaces from the quagmire of doomed affairs. It's all horrible, but the cumulative effect is of a glorious tapestry of observed detail.
Los Passos is usually identified with Hemingway and his writing has the same terse quality, as well as his devotion to giving a true account. Their style can be found reflected in the writing of all the great American authors, their characters are 'ordinary', the tone is one of stoic acceptance and moral detachment. When things go wrong, as they always do, the fault somehow is not the characters' but America's, a country where it seems people are set up to fail. The same tone and style can be observed from Faulkner, through Arthur Miller to the magnificent Cormac McCarthy.
The scattered cameos and sometimes disconnected narrative may make this book difficult at times, but it's well worth the effort.
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