ohn Dos Passos used to be a highly esteemed, well known American novelist in his day, but is largely forgotten now. An early pioneer of modernist techniques, Dos Passos was compared to such masters as Joyce for his use of multiple narratives involving complex webs of keenly observed characters along with excerpts from newsreels and other contemporary sources to give a kaleidoscopic, hopefully comprehensive picture of life in American society post WWI. His most famous work is the USA Trilogy.

The three works in this compilation precede the trilogy and are plainly early efforts where Dos Passos was attempting to find his voice. Of the three, I read Manhattan Transfer all the way through and found it the most satisfying. Dos Passos drew heavily on detail from his own personal life and builds up a series of interesting character studies ranging from a French gangster with a heart of gold to a Wall Street lawyer who always ends up serving himself despite periodic protestations of idealism. The protagonist is obviously a thinly veiled portrait of Dos Passos. He gets locked in a doomed romance with a young actress who's an appealing character until she decides to marry for money and security, dumping the protagonist.

Three Soldiers is based on Dos Passos's WWI experience and is even more heavily autobiographical than Transfer. I found the first part of the novel quite interesting. Dos Passos did a good job conveying the miserable dullness and degradation of life as enlisted scum in the US Army. The novel goes on for far too long, however, with an interminable focus on the protagonist's romance with a young French woman he meets after the Armistice is declared. Like a lot of beginning writers, Dos Passos puts in way too much material in this work. A severe overhaul by an editor like Maxwell Perkins would definitely have helped. I quit reading Three Soldiers about two thirds of the way through.

People interested in reading Dos Passos should probably try the USA Trilogy first before these works although Manhattan Transfer is a decent, stand alone read.

I STOPPED REAING 'Manhattan Transfer' WHEN I WAS MORE THAN HALF WAY THROUGH.
While I am not a fan of e-readers, I began to long for one to serve as a constant point of reference to the characters; Kindle's 'X-Ray' feature, to wit.
I'm a lover of epic literature and sagas, with a great leaning toward the late 19th century Russians. Another of my favorite reads are imigrant sagas,from classic to even some pop. Living with multifarious characters through 400 or more pages is a special delight.
Regardless of the spastic formatting, Dos Passos never gives us enough time to spend with his people, to be able to know them. All of this results in frustration to the point of, "I'm not having a worthwhile experience rading this".

Beyond that however is a constancy of superior narrative and a highly picturesque detailing of the time.

His chapter epigraphs are quite terrific, especially the first one. It not only hooked me to read, it is just extaordinary writing. I do wish that it was presented in a straight line by line prose instead of the few words to a line and italicized with ultra wide margins indicative of poetry.

If I were younger, I'd try this again, but this time on an e-reader.

All of the above aside, there is no question of the brilliant mission of the Library of America series. Would that they upgraded their paper stock [it seems to be only a few grades above that of tissue paper], so that one can EASILY turn pages. Additionally, a strurdier binding would turn these cloth bound volumes into a first class publishing endeavor.

I started out by reading Manhattan Transfer. The reviews that I read concerning this book, made it seem fantastic.It was interesting in some parts. Throughout most of the story,it was near impossible to keep track of who's who.While reading it, I began thinking that I should keep a scorecard of the different characters, since Dos Passos skips around so much.In One man's Initiation and Three Soldiers,the story was a little easier to track, since there were fewer characters.After awhile reading Three Soldiers,you definitely get the impression that John Dos Passos was not a big fan of the military. I think it was him not Fusselli, that wanted to kill all the officers.

"Juss set here a minute an look at her Gabriel....Look at the old bitch if you'll pardon the expression. Earthquake insurance, gosh they need it don't they? Do you know how long God took to destroy the tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There's more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City an Brooklyn an the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven seconds....Say kiddo what's your name?"

Please see my reviews of the individual works in this volume.

A note on the volume as a whole: I own the first printing of this book; perhaps some of the textual and editorial issues I encountered with this volume in the LOA have been fixed in later printings. Townsend Ludington wrote the notes for the volume, but he did a pretty piss-poor job of it. He is evidently a Dos Passos scholar. However, the notes on the texts are often less than informative, particularly the note on _Manhattan Transfer_, which merely relates when Dos Passos began composing the novel and when it was published. There is no information provided about where he got the idea for the novel, how it came to be published, or anything else (this for one of the most important novels of American modernism). Also the annotations of the text are massively insufficient. While many French phrases are translated, there are many more that are not (I did all right because French was the language required for my PhD work, but I imagine many readers will not be so lucky). Also, several items of 1910s-1920s slang are not glossed at all, which left me often wondering what the characters were talking about.

In addition, there are several obvious textual errors (most notably in _Manhattan Transfer_), which show that there was no serious attempt at copy editing the manuscripts. The books in this volume cannot be said to be "definitive" editions, as many other LOA volumes are. This is one of the worst volumes in these regards that I have encountered int he LOA series.

now reading "Manhattan Transfer"
...cray-zee!!