Synopses & Reviews
With U.S.A. John Dos Passos is said to have written the great American novel. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultivating their "own little corners", said Edmund Wilson, Dos Passos was taking on the world. Counted among the best novels of the century by the Modern Library and by some of the finest writers working today, U.S.A. is being talked about, studied, and read again, not just by students of modernism but by readers of all ages both here and abroad. Here is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation, buzzing with history and life on every page.
A "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage), The Big Money returns from the war to a nation on the upswing. The stock market surges, Lindbergh takes his solo flight, Henry Ford makes automobiles. It is an America speeding toward the crash of 1929.
Review
"The single greatest novel any of us have written, yes, in this country in the last one hundred years." -- Norman Mailer
Synopsis
THE BIG MONEY completes John Dos Passos's three-volume "fable of America's materialistic success and moral decline" (American Heritage) and marks the end of "one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken" (Time). Here we come back to America after the war and find a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms. The stock market surges. Lindbergh takes his solo flight. Henry Ford makes automobiles. From New York to Hollywood, love affairs to business deals, it is a country taking the turns too fast, speeding toward the crash of 1929.
Ultimately, whether the novels are read together or separately, they paint a sweeping portrait of collective America and showcase the brilliance and bravery of one of its most enduring and admired writers.
About the Author
John Dos Passos (1896-1970), a member of the Lost Generation, was the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction, including THREE SOLDIERS and MANHATTAN TRANSFER.