U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money
John Dos Passos
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars
4.06
· 18 ratings · 1312 pages · Published: 1930
A startling range of experimental devices captures the textures and background noises of 20th-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.
The U.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.
Tagged as:
- classics 3
- historical 3
- historical fiction 3
- political 3
- 20th century 3
- literary fiction 3
- world war I 2
- family 2
- epic 2
- social commentary 2
- crime 1
- psychological 1
- funny 1
- satire 1
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- format - reader age
- anthology 2
- adult fiction 1