John Dos Passos – författare

'My literary hero is John Dos Passos' - Adam Curtis (filmmaker) 'A modernist masterpiece, capturing ... the fragmented lives it sketches, in a dazzling kaleidoscope of New York City in the 1920s' Christopher Hudson, Evening Standard'Dos Passos has invented only one thing, an art of story-telling. But that is enough to create a universe' Jean-Paul Sartre'The best modern book about New York'D.H. LawrenceA modernist masterwork that has more in common with films than traditional novels, John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer includes an introduction by Jay McInerney in Penguin Modern Classics.A colourful, multi-faceted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with James Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental montage techniques borrowed from the cinema, vivid descriptions and bursts of overheard conversation, and the jumbled case histories of a picaresque cast of characters from dockside crapshooters to high-society flappers, Dos Passos constructs a brilliant impressionistic portrait of New York City as a great futuristic machine filled with motion, drama and human tragedy. John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was born in Chicago, the son of an eminent lawyer. After graduating from Harvard he served in the US Army Medical Corps during the First World War, and dabbled in journalism before embarking on life as a writer. In 1925 he published Manhattan Transfer, his first experimental novel in what was to become his peculiar style - a mixture of fact and fiction. His began a series of panoramic epics of American life with the USA trilogy, using the same technique and tracing, through interwoven biographies, the story of America from the early twentieth century to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

'My literary hero is John Dos Passos' - Adam Curtis (filmmaker) 'Wonderful and extraordinary'Robert McCrum, Observer'No novelist in America has written more sombrely of the dangers to individual integrity in a centrally controlled society'Alfred KazinThe Penguin Modern Classics edition of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. is a groundbreaking work of experimental fiction which, with its unique melange of fact and fiction, creates a compelling, tragic vision of America at the dawn of the twentieth century. 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 builds up a composite picture of American society in the first quarter of the 20th century. Richly detailed and throbbing with vitality, U.S.A. vividly evokes that uncertain period when America, so full of ideas and potential, was slowly and painfully abandoning the great American Dream.John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was born in Chicago, the son of an eminent lawyer. After graduating from Harvard he served in the US Army Medical Corps during the First World War, and dabbled in journalism before embarking on life as a writer. In 1925 he published Manhattan Transfer, his first experimental novel in what was to become his peculiar style - a mixture of fact and fiction. His began a series of panoramic epics of American life with the U.S.A. trilogy, using the same technique and tracing, through interwoven biographies, the story of America from the early twentieth century to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

Based on the author's first-hand experience as an ambulance driver during World War I, this first novel is noteworthy for its vivid and colorful portrait of France at that time and for its passionate indictment of war. The author's disillusionment with war, for a time, turned him toward socialism and against capitalism. Finally, after being labeled "pro-German" and "pacifist," Dos Passos concluded that the quasi-religion of Marxism was far more brutal than "poor old Capitalism ever dreamed of." Reprinted from the unexpurgated original edition published by Cornell University Press in 1969.