John Dos Passos: U.S.A. (LOA #85): The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money

Description

Unique among American books for its epic scope and panoramic social sweep,U.S.A.has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. Now The Library of America presents an exclusive one-volume edition of this enduring masterwork by John Dos Passos, including for the first time detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events that serve as a backdrop. In the novels that make up the trilogy-The 42nd Parallel,1919, andThe Big Money-Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that makeU.S.A.among the most compulsively readable of modern classics. A startling range of experimental devices captures the textures and background noises of twentieth-century life- "Newsreels" with blaring headlines; autobiographical "Camera Eye" sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness; "biographies" evoking emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen, and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling power, tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the Depression. TheU.S.A.trilogy is filled with American speech- labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. Their crisscrossing destinies take in wars and revolutions, desperate love affairs and harrowing family crises, corrupt public triumphs and private catastrophes, in settings that include the trenches of World War I, insurgent Mexico, Hollywood studios in the silent era, Wall Street boardrooms, and the tumultuous streets of Boston just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The volume contains newly researched chronologies of Dos Passos's life and of world events cited inU.S.A., notes, and an essay on textual selection. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was born in Chicago and graduated from Harvard in 1916. His service as an ambulance driver in Europe at the end of World War I led him to write Three Soldiers in 1919, the first in a series of works that established him as one of the most prolific, inventive, and influential American writers of the twentieth century. This volume was edited byTownsend Ludington, Cary C. Boshamer Professor of English and American Studies at the University of North Carolina and author ofJohn Dos Passos- A Twentieth Century Odyssey, andDaniel Aaron (1912-2016),Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literatureat Harvard University and a founder of The Library of America.

"The U.S.A. trilogy hasn't been available in a single volume for decades. All hail, then, the estimable Library of America, which has brought out such an edition. . . . Replete with notes and chronologies of both Dos Passos's life and of world events contemporaneous with the action of the novels, its edition of U.S.A. is one to savor." -The Plain Dealer