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In this experimental trilogy, Dos Passos uses "camera eye" and "newsreel" sections to create a fragmented atmosphere. Through the testimony of numerous characters, both fictional and historical figures, he buids up a composite picture of American society in the first quarter of the 20th century.
Unique among American novels for its epic scope and panoramic and
social sweep, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as
a monument of modern fiction. In the novels that make up the
trilogy - The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money
(1936) - 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 make U.S.A. among the most compulsively
readable of modern classics. In his prologue Dos Passos writes:
"U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding
companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound
in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a
column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western
Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers
and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in
pencil...But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people". The
trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and
advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior
decorators and movie stars. The volume contains newly researched
chronologies of Dos Passos' life and of world events cited in
U.S.A., notes, and an essay on textual selection.
Manhattan Transfer narrates fragments of the life of a vast gallery
of characters whose common denominator is the space and time in
which they move, the New York of the twenties, as well as the main
objective of most of them: obtaining money as fast and easy as
possible. What marks a clear dividing line between them is the
height at which they place their moral ready. The fact that the
characters represent the most diverse social layers (dock workers,
waiters in large hotels, prostitutes, alcohol traffickers, lawyers,
trade unionists...) and the most distant origins (French, Irish,
Caribbean, etc.) confer to this work the monumental character
portrait of a city. Â
A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental montage and collage techniques borrowed from the cinema, and the jumbled case histories of a picaresque range of characters from dockside crapshooters to high-society flappers, Dos Passos constructs a brilliant picture of New York City as a great futuristic machine filled with motion, drama and human tragedy.
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Streets Of Night
John DOS Passos
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R378
Discovery Miles 3 780
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Three Soldiers
John DOS Passos
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R1,113
Discovery Miles 11 130
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Three Soldiers
John DOS Passos
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R779
Discovery Miles 7 790
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