این مجموعه‌ی سه جلدی عالی از ادبیات امریکا بود؛ که امروز تموم شد. مدار ۴۲ رمان نخست این مجموعه و ۱۹۱۹ رمان دوم و پول کلان هم رمان سوم این مجموعه است.

A long and convoluted journey

When I set out on this journey three novels ago, I wasn't sure how engaged I would be. Not that I don't appreciate the subject matter. As a labor activist, I fully appreciate the importance of the period in question as these years surrounding World War I were critical to the growth of the labor movement. Rather, I was concerned how the zealous observations of a committed leftist would color their perspective of an era where America wrestled with the demands of the contradictions of an expanding global corporate footprint and a struggling working class.

What I came away with was how concerted and sanctioned the effort to keep workers from organizing and how tone deaf was capital and the courts to the legitimate suffering of workers in mining and steel country.

Sadly, while many of these conditions have improved, the cooperation between commerce, government and the courts continues to make it difficult to organize. Though the labels have changed, the demonization of those who strive to organize continues.

The U.S.A. Trilogy and Big Money demonstrate that so many of the arguments for and against the capitalist system haven't improved over the last 80+ years since Dos Passos took up the subject. The characters are as relevant now as when the author conceived them. the 1,300+ pages may seem daunting, but the story moves and the characters interweave to show the complicated tapestry of this nation and the people who have always made it great, even if only minor characters.

I did it. I read my last IR book. This whole experience has been nightmarish and in the aftermath I simply feel numb. The entire trilogy was by far the most boring piece of literature I have even encountered, and the ridiculous assignments accompanying it only made the experience that much more unbearable. The only good thing now is that it is over.

I’m not sure if I would consider this the strongest book of the trilogy upon a reread (it’s possible I just warmed to John Dos Passos’s style along the way) but this was certainly my favorite of the three books to read.

The Camera Eye (50) portion following the depiction of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial will stick with me for a long time — it was the single most striking snippet of the trilogy.

This whole series was so well written that it became like a drug. You were desperate to get back to it to keep reading. I really enjoyed the news reels and the small biographies of historical figures. This was an interesting innovation and helped to anchor the various narratives and compensate for the lack of a unifying plot. I'm sure the author's depiction of what life is really like in early 20th century America was shocking for many readers back in the day. He really lays bare the petty and selfish nature of most people. I was particularly struck by his sympathy for the women in the novel, who are often trapped in controlling relationships and preyed upon by despicable men. They are the only heroes in the trilogy if indeed you could claim that this work has heroes. Overall I found all three books of the trilogy to be extremely dark and cynical. Definitely a leftist's view of American history. I can see why the works of Dos Passos have faded from common readership and the established canon. His contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald were equally cynical and often as dark but you could at least find a glimmer of hope. With Dos Passos you are mired in doom.

Wanted to give this thing one star because i did not enjoy anything about it BUT lost my nerve. It is probably a very well written novel for a majority of the readers. For me , well I did not like any of the characters, did not care about what they thought or did plus I was expecting a GREAT READ from this. Had such great expectations , all failing to materialize.

The U.S.A. Trilogy is a phenomenal series. The first two books are the strongest in my opinion, but The Big Money is still an excellent book. This one chronicles the lives of primarily four individuals--two from the previous books and two new ones. Dos Passos remains committed to following people in the lower, middle, and upper classes of society giving a unique insight into America in the 1920s.

Dos Passos again shows the ugly underbelly of America without reservation, yet his characters are sympathetic.

This is a masterwork of fiction and should not be missed.

Audio. 3.5 stars. The historical tie-in is very good but inadequate. Longed for more. Too much uninteresting depth into too many characters. But the depiction of life and detail of era was fascinating in the previous books. But this Book #3 covers a less interesting time - too much about labor unions.

Hands down, the best three books I've read all year. Amazing writing from Dos Passos, downright courageous, given the time in which these were written. I'll be sending off for my Library of America hardcover of the entire trilogy in a single volume, and will dig into this many more times before my eyes are done with their work.

I'll be digging up his other work as well.

Highly recommended.

The U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money) were all set before, during/after, and in the decade following WWI. They were good, but also hard to read at times. Nearly every character is unhappy, and all the "romances" seemed to be more about lust or a desire for money. Most of the character development seemed plausible, but I would say that it doesn't seem very plausible to fall in love and/or propose marriage based on short acquaintanceships and very little interaction. Also, if everyone drank as much as they did in this book, Prohibition seems a lot more reasonable. It was stressful to read.

The themes were largely about the struggle to get ahead and between the have and have-nots. It reminded me a lot of today's political and economic climate, which is not a good thing considering that this time period produced communist Russia and led into the Great Depression. These books made me want to join a labor movement, or at least keep signing petitions and calling my senators.

A couple of years ago I read the Parade's End: The Tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford, and I think the two series, set in similar time periods but on opposite ends of the Atlantic are a good study of the time. Parade's End, being set in Britain, focused more on class issues and the changing social scene in Europe. U.S.A. focused, as the title implies, more on how the US was developing at this time. Parade's End dealt with the breakdown of an old class system, and USA dealt with the promise of upward movement, which is so rarely delivered upon, and with the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the US economic class divides.

From a literary end, I wasn't a big fan of "The Camera Eye" stream-of-consciousness sections, they just seemed jarring, although there were often some nice phrases in there. But I liked the intertwining lives of the fictional characters and the short "example" stories of real people from the time period.

Best quotes:
The only man that gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order … But an honest workin’ man like John or muself we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to bury us decent with – in Mac’s story

(Tell us doctors of philosophy, what are the needs of a man. At least a man needs to be notjailed notafraid nothungry notcold not without love, not a worker for a power he has never seen that cares nothing for the uses and needs of a man or a woman or a child.)
- from “Architect”, Frank Lloyd Wright’s story

(they have made us foreigners in the land where we were born they are the conquering army that has filtered into the country unnoticed they have taken the hilltops by stealth they levy toll they stand at the mineheadtthey stand at the pollstthey stand by when the bailiffs carry the furniture of the family evicted from the city tenement out on the sidewalk they are there when the bankers foreclose on a farm they are ambushed and ready to shoot down the strikers marching behind the flag up the switchback road to the mine those that guns spare they jail) – The Camera Eye

“in his mother’s words telling 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 the doughboys told after taps;
tit was the speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U. S. A.
tU. 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 theaters, a column of stock-quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary 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 Cemetary. 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”
- from the introduction

Dos Passos’s experimental USA Trilogy, with its various narrative modes and pastiche of newspaper stories, song lyrics, Newsreels, and Camera Eyes, is an ambitious, successful, and engaging literary achievement covering America over the first three decades of the 20th century. His reputation may not have grown the way Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s did, but it is growing and he is starting to get the recognition he richly deserves.

This book gets a one star improvement over the second entry in the trilogy just because I like the darker turn/tone it takes. Dos Passos still has no clue about how to write a woman character but at least as he's gotten older he's become more bitter about them and the motives he suspects in them. This leads him to allow the women to do some of the same kind of using that had been done to them by feckless men in the first two books. So I guess you could say a certain kind of shabby equality of the sexes has been achieved in this final volume of the USA trilogy.