From BookJive
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| Edition: | Library of America (Hardcover) |
| Author: | John Dos Passos |
| Published: | August 1996 |
| Pages: | 1312 |
| ISBN 10: | 1883011140 |
| New: | $20.99 (28) |
| Used: | $9.97 (44) |
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The U.S.A. Trilogy is the major work of American writer John Dos Passos. The three-volume set includes:
- The 42nd Parallel (1930)
- 1919, also known as Nineteen Nineteen (1932)
- The Big Money (1936)
The three books were first published together as a one-volume edition in 1938, to which Dos Passos added the prologue labeled "U.S.A." The trilogy employs an experimental technique, incorporating four different narrative modes: fictional narratives telling the life stories of twelve fictional characters; collages of newspaper clippings and song lyrics labeled Newsreel; individually labeled short biographies of public figures of the time such as Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford; and fragments of an autobiographical stream of consciousness labeled Camera Eye. The trilogy covers the historical development of American society during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
The Four Narrative Modes
In the fictional narrative sections, the U.S.A. trilogy relates the lives of twelve different characters as they struggle to find a place in American society during the early part of the twentieth century. Each character is presented to the reader from their childhood on and in free indirect speech.
While their lives are quite separate and distinct, characters occasionally meet and interact with each other; also, some minor characters whose own point of view is never given crop up again and again in the background, forming a kind of bridge between the different characters.
The Camera Eye sections are written in stream-of-consciousness technique and add up to an autobiographical Künstlerroman of Dos Passos, tracing the author's development from a child to a politically committed writer. Camera Eye 50 arguably contains the most famous line of the whole trilogy, when Dos Passos states upon the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti: "alright we are two nations."
The Newsreels consist of first page headlines and article fragments taken from the Chicago Tribune for The 42nd Parallel and from the New York World for Nineteen Nineteen and The Big Money, as well as lyrics from popular songs of the time. Newsreel 66, immediately preceding Camera Eye 50 and announcing the Sacco and Vanzetti verdict, is noteworthy as it contains the lyrics of The Internationale.
The biographies are accounts of historical figures. The most famous and often anthologized of these biographies is The Body of an American that tells the story of an unknown American soldier who fell in World War I and which concludes Nineteen Nineteen.
However, the separation between these narrative modes is rather a stylistic than a thematic one. Thus, some critics have pointed out connections between the fictional character Mary French in The Big Money and journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, calling into question the strict separation between fictional characters and biographies; and coherent quotes from newspaper articles are often woven into the biographies as well, calling into question the strict separation between them and the Newsreel sections.
