One Man's Initiation

John Dos Passos (1896-1970), after graduating from Harvard in 1916, became an ambulance driver on the Western Front; which he would later use as a backdrop for his first two novels: One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). Dos Passos published the technically innovative U.S.A. trilogy, which consists of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1929), 1919 (1931), and The Big Money (1936). The U.S.A. trilogy confirmed Dos Passos's position in the American literary canon. Edmund Wilson hailed Dos Passos on the publication of U.S.A. trilogy as "The first of our writers-with the possible exception of Mark Twain-who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness."

Few reviewers and readers took note of 'One Man's Initiation, 1917' upon its initial appearance, but Dos Passos's personal tale of the carnage of war and his own survival as a volunteer ambulance driver over the battlefields of France and Italy in 1917speaks vividly to readers of the 21st century 'lest we forget.'>