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The U.S.A. Trilogy #3
The Big Money
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.
“It is not simply that [Dos Passos] has a keen eye for people, but that he has a keen eye for so many different kinds of people.” — New York Times
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.
“It is not simply that [Dos Passos] has a keen eye for people, but that he has a keen eye for so many different kinds of people.” — New York Times
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1936
167 people are currently reading
5187 people want to read
About the author
John Dos Passos
213 books587 followersJohn Dos Passos was a prominent American novelist, artist, and political thinker best known for his U.S.A. trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—a groundbreaking work of modernist fiction that employed experimental narrative techniques to depict the complexities of early 20th-century American life. Born in Chicago in 1896, he was educated at Harvard and served as an ambulance driver during World War I, experiences that deeply influenced his early literary themes. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, and the antiwar Three Soldiers drew on his wartime observations and marked him as a major voice among the Lost Generation.
Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer brought him widespread recognition and introduced stylistic innovations that would define his later work. His U.S.A. trilogy fused fiction, biography, newsreel-style reportage, and autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections to explore the impact of capitalism, war, and political disillusionment on the American psyche. Once aligned with leftist politics, Dos Passos grew increasingly disillusioned with Communism, especially after the murder of his friend José Robles during the Spanish Civil War—a turning point that led to a break with Ernest Hemingway and a sharp turn toward conservatism.
Throughout his career, Dos Passos remained politically engaged, writing essays, journalism, and historical studies while also campaigning for right-leaning figures like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s. He contributed to publications such as American Heritage, National Review, and The Freeman, and published over forty books including biographies and historical reflections. Despite political shifts, his commitment to liberty and skepticism of authoritarianism remained central themes.
Also a visual artist, Dos Passos created cover art and illustrations for many of his own books, exhibiting a style influenced by modernist European art. Though less acclaimed for his painting, he remained artistically active throughout his life. His multidisciplinary approach and innovations in narrative structure influenced numerous writers and filmmakers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer and Adam Curtis.
Later recognized with the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for literature in 1967, Dos Passos’s legacy endures through his literary innovations and sharp commentary on American identity. He died in 1970, leaving behind a vast and diverse body of work that continues to shape the landscape of American fiction.
Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer brought him widespread recognition and introduced stylistic innovations that would define his later work. His U.S.A. trilogy fused fiction, biography, newsreel-style reportage, and autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections to explore the impact of capitalism, war, and political disillusionment on the American psyche. Once aligned with leftist politics, Dos Passos grew increasingly disillusioned with Communism, especially after the murder of his friend José Robles during the Spanish Civil War—a turning point that led to a break with Ernest Hemingway and a sharp turn toward conservatism.
Throughout his career, Dos Passos remained politically engaged, writing essays, journalism, and historical studies while also campaigning for right-leaning figures like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s. He contributed to publications such as American Heritage, National Review, and The Freeman, and published over forty books including biographies and historical reflections. Despite political shifts, his commitment to liberty and skepticism of authoritarianism remained central themes.
Also a visual artist, Dos Passos created cover art and illustrations for many of his own books, exhibiting a style influenced by modernist European art. Though less acclaimed for his painting, he remained artistically active throughout his life. His multidisciplinary approach and innovations in narrative structure influenced numerous writers and filmmakers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer and Adam Curtis.
Later recognized with the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for literature in 1967, Dos Passos’s legacy endures through his literary innovations and sharp commentary on American identity. He died in 1970, leaving behind a vast and diverse body of work that continues to shape the landscape of American fiction.
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September 13, 2024
The globe spins… Time flies…
The war is over. And the rich grew richer and the poor went poorer…
And suffering from a postwar hangover soldiers sailed home to seek their place in the sun in peace. And those who’ve been scrupulous enough not to trample people under their feet were trampled under the feet of the unscrupulous ones…
Those who flew out of luck were going down losing their human qualities on the way down and those who flew into big money were going up losing their human qualities on the way up.
And at that everyone attempts to do everything possible to hasten one’s ruination.
The globe spins… Time flies…
At Versailles allies and enemies, magnates, generals, flunkey politicians were slamming the shutters against the storm, against the new, against hope. It was suddenly clear for a second in the thundering glare what war was about, what peace was about.
The war is over. And the rich grew richer and the poor went poorer…
In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safe deposit vaults, the last puffs of the ozone of revolt went stale in the whisper of speakeasy arguments.
And suffering from a postwar hangover soldiers sailed home to seek their place in the sun in peace. And those who’ve been scrupulous enough not to trample people under their feet were trampled under the feet of the unscrupulous ones…
…every man his pigeonhole… the personality must be kept carefully adjusted over the face… to facilitate recognition she pins on each of us a badge… today entails tomorrow…
Those who flew out of luck were going down losing their human qualities on the way down and those who flew into big money were going up losing their human qualities on the way up.
And at that everyone attempts to do everything possible to hasten one’s ruination.
The globe spins… Time flies…
May 1, 2023
The Big Cake. The title eloquently qualifies the rat race closing the Dos Passos, U.S.A trilogy. Apart from a few irreducible utopians, doomed to failure, believing in the values of solidarity and social justice that the Great War put under a bushel, American society has become the theatre of the most fierce individualism. The materialistic translation vision of freedom and the pursuit of happiness is at the very heart of the Constitution of this country. By the means and with the most diverse fortunes, the characters, except a young woman involved in the social struggle, have only one idea: to feel significant, touch the jackpot, and make their place in the sun. Relationships boil down to business relationships, admitted or not; they are acquaintances; we keep them as long as we can use them; they are stepping stones to prosperity. This busy little world represents the America of the roaring twenties, triumphant and prosperous, tiny human gears in constant Overspeed and, despite prohibition, imbibing alcohol and stuffing themselves with sleeping pills as substitutes for lubricant as if to forget that they all have datedness programmed by their physical Constitution and way of life.
Read with much more enthusiasm than the second part; the Big Cake is the completion of the great work of Dos Passos; it is also "the main course" by its dimensions superior to the first two opuses. The narrative technique, which has to be discussed and divided into four different registers, maintains the reader's interest through its diversity. The U.S.A. is a large, hair-raising fresco, which requires long-term reading to be fully appreciated, not to lose the thread of the characters' destinies, the three parts not constituting truly autonomous novels of the reappearance of characters involved in the various volumes. What makes it attractive can also include an obstacle; its titanic dimensions lend themselves to the availability of the modern reader.
Read with much more enthusiasm than the second part; the Big Cake is the completion of the great work of Dos Passos; it is also "the main course" by its dimensions superior to the first two opuses. The narrative technique, which has to be discussed and divided into four different registers, maintains the reader's interest through its diversity. The U.S.A. is a large, hair-raising fresco, which requires long-term reading to be fully appreciated, not to lose the thread of the characters' destinies, the three parts not constituting truly autonomous novels of the reappearance of characters involved in the various volumes. What makes it attractive can also include an obstacle; its titanic dimensions lend themselves to the availability of the modern reader.
May 16, 2021
I thought this was a strong finish for the USA trilogy. I especially enjoyed the vision of my hometown Miami and in particular, William Jennings Bryant at my favorite watering hole of all-time, Venetian Pool as well as the birth of childhood romping grounds Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, and South Beach. It was hard to find sympathy for Charles Anderson, but I did enjoy Margo and Mary quite a lot. As in all of these books, most of the characters' arcs end in tragedy, but what I found most striking were the rampant alcoholism (I can't think of any male characters except for Bingham that were not chronic alcoholics) and the raw sexuality. The book takes place exactly 100 years ago in the 20s between the close of 1919 to the stock market crash of 1929. It was apparently a heady period that saw massive upheavals in society with electricity, flight, and the beginning of American hegemony on the world stage. The character portraits of Hearst, the Wright brothers, and others along with Dos Passos' own autobiographical sections "The Camera's Eye" and the Newsreels once again were effective ways of breaking up the narrative while also driving it forward. Between the abuses of capitalism (this was a period where the rich-poor gap started to widen precipitously) and the labor struggles, we are truly thrown in the middle of the maelstrom of the changing American society.
I liked this quote from late in the book:
If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at streetcorners to scorning men. I might have died unknown, unmarked, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do so much work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as how we do by an accident.
now their work is over. the immigrants haters of oppression lie in black suits in the little undertaking parlor in the North End the city is quiet the men of the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets
they have won why are they scared to be seen on the streets? on the streets you only see the downcast faces of the beaten the streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be burned we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins
we stand defeated America" (p. 372)
I can see why this book, and this series, is considered one of the great members of the canon of 20th-century literature. It requires some patience and certainly, the styles need some getting used to, but I truly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.
I liked this quote from late in the book:
If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at streetcorners to scorning men. I might have died unknown, unmarked, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do so much work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as how we do by an accident.
now their work is over. the immigrants haters of oppression lie in black suits in the little undertaking parlor in the North End the city is quiet the men of the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets
they have won why are they scared to be seen on the streets? on the streets you only see the downcast faces of the beaten the streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be burned we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins
we stand defeated America" (p. 372)
I can see why this book, and this series, is considered one of the great members of the canon of 20th-century literature. It requires some patience and certainly, the styles need some getting used to, but I truly enjoyed it and highly recommend it.
August 10, 2021
این مجموعهی سه جلدی عالی از ادبیات امریکا بود؛ که امروز تموم شد. مدار ۴۲ رمان نخست این مجموعه و ۱۹۱۹ رمان دوم و پول کلان هم رمان سوم این مجموعه است.
📚
در کتاب مدار ۲۴ بیشتر شاهد ورود و معرفی شخصیتها، فرهنگ کوچه بازاری مردم امریکا، عدم تطابق دستمزدها و دسترنجها با میزان کار و... هستیم. در جلد دوم و سوم هم رویدادهای سیاسی و تاریخی قرن بیستم بیان شده و به بررسی و شناخت جنگ در اروپا پرداخته و این ابتکاری است که نویسنده به خرج داده... کتاب به اعتصاب کارگران و حمایت از آنها پرداخته و در راستای مخالفت با کاپیتالیسمه. تعداد شخصیتهای رمان زیاده و ۱۲ شخصیت اصلی داره که روند زندگی هر کدام را میخوانیم.
📚
نویسنده قبل از هر چی معتقده که رماننویس باید معمار تاریخ باشه و برخلاف بسیاری از نویسندگان اخیر امریکا معتقده که تاریخ عینیت داره.
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طبق گفتهی نویسنده او «دوربین عکاسی» را به دست گرفته و احساساتش را در آن ریخته و به همین دلیل آسانتر توانسته احساسات شخصی
اش را از برخی بخشهای کتاب دور نگه دارد، تا جایی که به واقعیت هم نزدیک باشد.
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چون کتاب علاوه بر قسمتهای روایی داستانی شامل بخش اخبار ( اخباری که به طور عامیانه بیان شده)، زندگینامه شخصیتهای ثاقعی و دوربین عکاسی هم هست.
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به طور کلی من کتاب رو دوست داشتم ، جلد اول خیلی سریع پیش رفت ولی جلد سوم یکم کند شده بود. درگیریهای اجتماعی، اقتصادی و سیاسی هر کدام از شخصیتهای داستان برام جالب بودند. بحران جنگ و همچنین اثراتش روی زندگی افراد... داستان پرشهای زیادی داره که ممکنه برای برخی خستهکننده باشه. اگر به رمان تاریخی علاقه دارید این میتونه براتون کتاب خوبی باشه، سه جلدی که در عین استقلال بهم پیوستهاند.
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در کتاب مدار ۲۴ بیشتر شاهد ورود و معرفی شخصیتها، فرهنگ کوچه بازاری مردم امریکا، عدم تطابق دستمزدها و دسترنجها با میزان کار و... هستیم. در جلد دوم و سوم هم رویدادهای سیاسی و تاریخی قرن بیستم بیان شده و به بررسی و شناخت جنگ در اروپا پرداخته و این ابتکاری است که نویسنده به خرج داده... کتاب به اعتصاب کارگران و حمایت از آنها پرداخته و در راستای مخالفت با کاپیتالیسمه. تعداد شخصیتهای رمان زیاده و ۱۲ شخصیت اصلی داره که روند زندگی هر کدام را میخوانیم.
📚
نویسنده قبل از هر چی معتقده که رماننویس باید معمار تاریخ باشه و برخلاف بسیاری از نویسندگان اخیر امریکا معتقده که تاریخ عینیت داره.
📚
طبق گفتهی نویسنده او «دوربین عکاسی» را به دست گرفته و احساساتش را در آن ریخته و به همین دلیل آسانتر توانسته احساسات شخصی
اش را از برخی بخشهای کتاب دور نگه دارد، تا جایی که به واقعیت هم نزدیک باشد.
📚
چون کتاب علاوه بر قسمتهای روایی داستانی شامل بخش اخبار ( اخباری که به طور عامیانه بیان شده)، زندگینامه شخصیتهای ثاقعی و دوربین عکاسی هم هست.
📚
به طور کلی من کتاب رو دوست داشتم ، جلد اول خیلی سریع پیش رفت ولی جلد سوم یکم کند شده بود. درگیریهای اجتماعی، اقتصادی و سیاسی هر کدام از شخصیتهای داستان برام جالب بودند. بحران جنگ و همچنین اثراتش روی زندگی افراد... داستان پرشهای زیادی داره که ممکنه برای برخی خستهکننده باشه. اگر به رمان تاریخی علاقه دارید این میتونه براتون کتاب خوبی باشه، سه جلدی که در عین استقلال بهم پیوستهاند.
April 18, 2023
”In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safe deposit vaults, the last puff of the ozone of revolt went stale in the whisper of speakeasy arguments.”
The Big Money is the final installment of Dos Passos’s sprawling, experimental novel, USA. It captures the endgame of the ambition and striving of the era. Utopian plans for progressive worker’s paradise were violently suppressed by government and industry and internally stymied by party dogma. Striving for financial success in business proved elusive to most, and hollow to the few who found it. Success in entertainment and pictures proved a vapor. The rich got richer, and everyone else could go to hell.
As in the first two installments, we get to follow several separate, imperfect protagonist who give us glimpses into the worlds of business, labor, and entertainment. These sections are broken up with Newsreel segments that provide topical headlines and snippets of popular song, the author’s personal, stream of consciousness perspective in The Cameras Eye segments, and mini biographies of the era’s history makers. (Those covered in The Big Money are Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, the Wright Brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Randolph Hearst, and Samuel Insull.) The channel surfing, experimental nature of the novel lends itself to audiobook as the ideal way to experience it.
The Big Money is the final installment of Dos Passos’s sprawling, experimental novel, USA. It captures the endgame of the ambition and striving of the era. Utopian plans for progressive worker’s paradise were violently suppressed by government and industry and internally stymied by party dogma. Striving for financial success in business proved elusive to most, and hollow to the few who found it. Success in entertainment and pictures proved a vapor. The rich got richer, and everyone else could go to hell.
As in the first two installments, we get to follow several separate, imperfect protagonist who give us glimpses into the worlds of business, labor, and entertainment. These sections are broken up with Newsreel segments that provide topical headlines and snippets of popular song, the author’s personal, stream of consciousness perspective in The Cameras Eye segments, and mini biographies of the era’s history makers. (Those covered in The Big Money are Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, the Wright Brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Randolph Hearst, and Samuel Insull.) The channel surfing, experimental nature of the novel lends itself to audiobook as the ideal way to experience it.
August 20, 2021
This is the third and final book of the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos with this book covering the post war years often referred to as the "roaring twenties." Much of what I mentioned in my reviews of
42nd Parallel
and
1919
regarding multiple narrative styles also applies to this book as well. Consequently, this book shares the scattered focus of the other books. However, this book when compared relative to the first two books impressed me as being a bit more interconnected.
The 1920s are represented in this book by four points of view: business, entertainment, advertising, and labor. A repeating characteristic among the book's characters is that appearance or perception of wealth is more important than its reality. Numerous times the appearance of wealth was illusory and quickly disappeared. I think all the book's characters were penniless at some time in their life.
There were many references to playing the stock market, drinking too much (prohibition didn't have much effect), sexual relations including abortions, and writing home for money. One interesting thing I noted was that the Spanish Flu is mentioned only once. There are several times when characters are sick with flu, but there's no acknowledgment as a worldwide pandemic. I think this matches the lack of public awareness at the time of what was going on.
Does this book have a conclusion? Well sort of and not really. Just for the heck of it I've included the poetic sign-off provided by the last chapter in this .
The 1920s are represented in this book by four points of view: business, entertainment, advertising, and labor. A repeating characteristic among the book's characters is that appearance or perception of wealth is more important than its reality. Numerous times the appearance of wealth was illusory and quickly disappeared. I think all the book's characters were penniless at some time in their life.
There were many references to playing the stock market, drinking too much (prohibition didn't have much effect), sexual relations including abortions, and writing home for money. One interesting thing I noted was that the Spanish Flu is mentioned only once. There are several times when characters are sick with flu, but there's no acknowledgment as a worldwide pandemic. I think this matches the lack of public awareness at the time of what was going on.
Does this book have a conclusion? Well sort of and not really. Just for the heck of it I've included the poetic sign-off provided by the last chapter in this .
November 7, 2023
‘Here’s where the strings come in.’ So sayeth Ubu Superchunk, so say I in regard to this final installment of the USA tri-logorrhea. Dos Passos saves all the Zim; brings all the Zam; holds back no Zoom as our formerly disparate threads weave the rope with which to hang the collective American Self. It’s moving stuff, it’s realistic; ‘idealistic’ having died and risen, died and risen, like some guileless, shitkicker Lazarus until a factory came into being whose machinery was efficient enough to kill and kill the little fucker every time his towhead popped back into being. That factory’s still going today—all it produces are dead Lazari, and its carcinogenic effluvium is expelled into a Great Lake. I don’t know which one. Erie?
1919, the previous entry in the series, functions as Dos Passos’ exposition of how America was bought cheap and sold high. The forces that impelled the American war machine into effecting mass death in WWI are weighed and found to be wholly predicated upon a calculus of profit and loss. That the loss was human, for God’s sake, is immaterial...literally; people make themselves for free! Does the human reproductive system know no P&L, not even the basest rules of commercial accountancy? Luckily, well, no. People keep on fucking, making a whole lot of free fucking capital for expenditure with no investment outlaid. Outstanding American: you do your job by making more You. Keep it up. (Puns…)
The Big Money is the cementing of the roast carving at Versailles, the liminal vacuum that resulted in Vichy France, etc. If it stopped there, it would be a history lesson brilliantly told, but without any soul to it. And Dos Passos, here Dos Pathos, do bringeth the Soul to its cynosure as the thesis of USA. Though the characters, the bulk of whom we’ve followed behind for far more than 1000 pages, most often find that dissolution is the only solution to the problem of American life, it is all earned pain on Dos Passos’ part. There are no tactical ministrations of tweaking your heartstrings. Never going for the Easy Sad or the Big Happy, where we part from his cross-section of women and men is, largely, just realistic. And that sonofabitch known as Reality, by definition and constitution, is far more pulverizing in its attrition than most novels cede. The fact of the matter is that the majority of us are not eaten by our white whale, thus fulfilling fate while establishing cliché. Nor do we find our chairs and our jets, a la Murphy; get our old asses to shore with our metaphors eaten but still attached to the canoe; receive the ravine of dogs in Old Mexico for our corpses to be wolfed (get it?) down; etc. etc. We just face the daily pulverizer, with varying degrees of dignity, until we each hit our all-time low.
As such, in The Big Money we say goodbye, midsentence, to people that have made us feel so substantively that they have effected real change in history through You, the reader. What more can books do? What more can we ask of letters arranged in such a way as to partially come to arrange and, thusly, define ourselves? How do we ever find closure when the one page, analogous to one day of actual life, is suddenly—
(That’s how: We just end: And everything with it—funk to funky)
1919, the previous entry in the series, functions as Dos Passos’ exposition of how America was bought cheap and sold high. The forces that impelled the American war machine into effecting mass death in WWI are weighed and found to be wholly predicated upon a calculus of profit and loss. That the loss was human, for God’s sake, is immaterial...literally; people make themselves for free! Does the human reproductive system know no P&L, not even the basest rules of commercial accountancy? Luckily, well, no. People keep on fucking, making a whole lot of free fucking capital for expenditure with no investment outlaid. Outstanding American: you do your job by making more You. Keep it up. (Puns…)
The Big Money is the cementing of the roast carving at Versailles, the liminal vacuum that resulted in Vichy France, etc. If it stopped there, it would be a history lesson brilliantly told, but without any soul to it. And Dos Passos, here Dos Pathos, do bringeth the Soul to its cynosure as the thesis of USA. Though the characters, the bulk of whom we’ve followed behind for far more than 1000 pages, most often find that dissolution is the only solution to the problem of American life, it is all earned pain on Dos Passos’ part. There are no tactical ministrations of tweaking your heartstrings. Never going for the Easy Sad or the Big Happy, where we part from his cross-section of women and men is, largely, just realistic. And that sonofabitch known as Reality, by definition and constitution, is far more pulverizing in its attrition than most novels cede. The fact of the matter is that the majority of us are not eaten by our white whale, thus fulfilling fate while establishing cliché. Nor do we find our chairs and our jets, a la Murphy; get our old asses to shore with our metaphors eaten but still attached to the canoe; receive the ravine of dogs in Old Mexico for our corpses to be wolfed (get it?) down; etc. etc. We just face the daily pulverizer, with varying degrees of dignity, until we each hit our all-time low.
As such, in The Big Money we say goodbye, midsentence, to people that have made us feel so substantively that they have effected real change in history through You, the reader. What more can books do? What more can we ask of letters arranged in such a way as to partially come to arrange and, thusly, define ourselves? How do we ever find closure when the one page, analogous to one day of actual life, is suddenly—
(That’s how: We just end: And everything with it—funk to funky)
September 11, 2020
I'm not sure that the essences of each individual novel are worth anything, but rather, the "novel" as a whole, by that I mean, as a trilogy. My review of the trilogy is here.
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July 14, 2010Do you ever start a series, and you're really digging it and read the first few books right in a row, and then decide you don't feel like reading the last book right at the moment, so you take a bit of a break, sure that you'll be back to finish up the series before any time at all because you like it so well, but then one thing leads to another and years have gone by since you devoured the first few books, and the details are no longer clear in your mind, so you put off reading the last book because you have a vague idea you might start the series again from the beginning to remind yourself of all the things you've undoubtedly forgotten in the meantime, but with all the tempting unread books on your list you never feel like making quite that large of a re-reading commitment, so the final book just sits on your shelves for years and years and possibly decades, caught in a kind of limbo, even though you're pretty much guaranteed to enjoy it if you'd just pick it up? Well, that's what happened to me with John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.
For those who aren't familiar with this trilogy, its novelty is in its form. Dos Passos, an American Modernist and contemporary of Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein and the rest of that expat cadre, has assembled something less like a novel and more like a collaged portrait of the United States during three consecutive periods of history: The 42nd Parallel deals with the early years of the 20th century; 1919 is concerned with the American experience of World War I; and The Big Money, the long-awaited (to me) capstone of the trilogy, is concerned with the boom years following the War, during which America was hurtling unknowingly toward the Great Depression. (All three were written during the Great Depression, fro 1930 to 1936, so the shadow of coming events looms large over them, especially the last one.)
The novels in the series share a common structure: they are composed of four different types of sections, which alternate unpredictably with one another like an improvisational jazz piece. The "Newsreel" sections are themselves collages, juxtapositions of newspaper headlines, contemporary speeches, and fragments of popular songs of the time. Dos Passos is excellent, I think, at giving a sense of the sweeping progress of history as found in the minutiae of the popular media, and also a sense of its myopia and the self-serving language of politics, advertising, and the press. Forgive the lengthy block quote, but I think the easiest way to explain the Newsreels is just to show you how they work:
Juxtaposed with the Newsreels are sections of plain, accessible prose that tell the stories of fictional characters—the most traditional, novel-like elements of the book. These chapters are named for their main characters: "Charley Anderson," "Mary French." More on these later, but they probably make up between two-thirds and three-quarters of the text.
In amongst the Newsreels and story elements, there are also "Camera Eye" sections, in which Dos Passos relates his own experience in stream-of-consciousness prose. This is his attempt to expose the ostensibly "godlike" authorial voice for what it was: just another human living his life. And finally, in addition to the Camera Eye sections, there are also poems scattered through the books which tell the stories of famous real-life people of the era: Henry Ford, Rudolph Valentino, William Randolph Hearst, Thorstein Veblen. These are truthfully my favorite parts of Dos Passos's trilogy; his poem on Eugene Debs in The 42nd Parallel convinced me I'd found a new favorite writer. I think what I love about them is Dos Passos's mixture of resignation, sadness and anger at how, time and time again, complex and contradictory humans let their vices and petty prejudices mar their own endeavors. From "TIN LIZZIE," the poem on Henry Ford:
For Dos Passos, Ford's absurd, rabid racism and oddly obsessive provincial nostalgia (his desire that the whole world be "like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days") coexists with a storyteller's appreciation of his business prowess and the epic change his cars created in the American landscape. Every person is simultaneously great and small, Dos Passos seems to be arguing; every person is at once admirable and hateful. The fact that Ford himself longed for old-fashioned quiet and simplicity, and spent his final years on a restored simulacrum of his father's farm, removed from the noise of his own automobiles, is just the kind of poignant, contradictory detail Dos Passos loves.
The actual "characters" of U.S.A., the ones invented rather than just evoked by Dos Passos, who are the subjects of the trilogy's prose sections, come from a variety of backgrounds, but often work hard to end up in a different part of society than the one in which they started: working-class, middle-America Charley Anderson, for example, gifted with machines and a flying ace in WWI, starts his own aviation company with a friend and ends up wealthy, married to a society girl; meanwhile Mary French, daughter of the Main Line, goes against her mother's wishes and leaves college to be a union organizer and community activist. The common thread, however, is that no matter what Dos Passos characters decide they want, it seldom makes them happy, and they usually end up sabotaging their own efforts in one way or another.
Indeed, the one uniting element of all the U.S.A. characters is that they are slaves to, and undone by, their vices, whether those be for sex, alcohol, social position, or money. The characters who do best both materially and psychologically, like actress Margo Dowling, are usually the most pragmatic, the ones who acknowledge that they're playing a survival game, and look out for themselves and (sometimes) those around them with an utter lack of romanticism. Margo has no grand illusions, especially once she passes the age of about twenty, and that saves her from the pathetic fate of those who keep telling themselves stories about who they are and what they want—stories that get less true all the time. Former golden boy and flying ace Charley Anderson is a particularly pathetic example of the Dos Passos milieu: believing his every whim has a compelling reason behind it (that his lust is love, and his drunken well-being happiness), he descends ever-farther into debt, alienation and alcoholism while telling himself stories about his flying brilliance. Even the activist Mary French, who is probably closest to Dos Passos in her leftist outlook and untiring political work, becomes a victim of her own illusions as she falls in love with a series of condescending, emotionally unavailable fellow activists.
This compulsion, in Dos Passos characters, to let their vices sabotage their dreams didn't bother me as much in the first two books as it did this time around, in The Big Money. I'm not sure if the series actually does become more bitter as it goes along, or whether I've become more sensitive in the ten years since reading the last two books—my guess is that both might be true. It would certainly make sense that, as the country careens toward the crash of 1929, Dos Passos would become more condemnatory of the way Americans were behaving, since he laid the responsibility for the depression of the 1930s squarely on the shoulders of the irresponsible stock market speculators of the 1920s, and on American capitalism as a whole. And it's not that I don't relate to the pattern he lays out—obviously it does happen, and it's a classic setup for a tragedy of the everyday. I just can't help believing that it doesn't happen to everyone—that idealism and dreams, while dangerous as a sole frame of reference, can be an important asset if balanced by practicality.
Despite my qualms about the uniformly miserable characters, though, I remain in awe of Dos Passos's technical verve and audacity, and I love the way he simultaneously creates a broad canvas of events on the national level, and an intimate canvas of regular individuals making their way.
For those who aren't familiar with this trilogy, its novelty is in its form. Dos Passos, an American Modernist and contemporary of Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein and the rest of that expat cadre, has assembled something less like a novel and more like a collaged portrait of the United States during three consecutive periods of history: The 42nd Parallel deals with the early years of the 20th century; 1919 is concerned with the American experience of World War I; and The Big Money, the long-awaited (to me) capstone of the trilogy, is concerned with the boom years following the War, during which America was hurtling unknowingly toward the Great Depression. (All three were written during the Great Depression, fro 1930 to 1936, so the shadow of coming events looms large over them, especially the last one.)
The novels in the series share a common structure: they are composed of four different types of sections, which alternate unpredictably with one another like an improvisational jazz piece. The "Newsreel" sections are themselves collages, juxtapositions of newspaper headlines, contemporary speeches, and fragments of popular songs of the time. Dos Passos is excellent, I think, at giving a sense of the sweeping progress of history as found in the minutiae of the popular media, and also a sense of its myopia and the self-serving language of politics, advertising, and the press. Forgive the lengthy block quote, but I think the easiest way to explain the Newsreels is just to show you how they work:
'Twarn't for powder and for storebought hair
De man I love would not gone nowhere
if one should seek a simple explanation of his career it would doubtless be found in that extraordinary decision to forsake the ease of a clerkship for the wearying labor of a section hand. The youth who so early in life had so much of judgment and willpower could not fail to rise above the general run of men. He became the intimate of bankersSt. Louis woman wid her diamon' rings
Pulls dat man aroun' by her apron strings
Tired of walking, riding a bicycle or riding in streetcars, he is likely to buy a Ford.DAYLIGHT HOLDUP SCATTERS CROWD
Just as soon as his wife discovers that every Ford is like every other Ford and that nearly everyone has one, she is likely to influence him to step into the next social group, of which the Dodge is the most conspicuous example.desperate revolver battle follows
The next step comes when daughter comes back from college and the family moves into a new home. Father wants economy. Mother craves opportunity for her children, daughter desires social prestige and son wants travel, speed, get-up-and-go.MAN SLAIN NEAR HOTEL MAJESTIC
BY THREE FOOTPADS
I hate to see de evenin sun go down
Hate to see de evenin sun go down
Cause my baby he done lef' dis town
Juxtaposed with the Newsreels are sections of plain, accessible prose that tell the stories of fictional characters—the most traditional, novel-like elements of the book. These chapters are named for their main characters: "Charley Anderson," "Mary French." More on these later, but they probably make up between two-thirds and three-quarters of the text.
In amongst the Newsreels and story elements, there are also "Camera Eye" sections, in which Dos Passos relates his own experience in stream-of-consciousness prose. This is his attempt to expose the ostensibly "godlike" authorial voice for what it was: just another human living his life. And finally, in addition to the Camera Eye sections, there are also poems scattered through the books which tell the stories of famous real-life people of the era: Henry Ford, Rudolph Valentino, William Randolph Hearst, Thorstein Veblen. These are truthfully my favorite parts of Dos Passos's trilogy; his poem on Eugene Debs in The 42nd Parallel convinced me I'd found a new favorite writer. I think what I love about them is Dos Passos's mixture of resignation, sadness and anger at how, time and time again, complex and contradictory humans let their vices and petty prejudices mar their own endeavors. From "TIN LIZZIE," the poem on Henry Ford:
One thing he brought back from his trip
was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
He started a campaign to enlighten the world in the Dearborn Independent; the Jews were why the world wasn't like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days;
the Jews had started the war, Bolshevism, Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche, short skirts and lipstick. They were behind Wall Street and the international bankers, and the whiteslave traffic and the movies and the Supreme Court and ragtime and the illegal liquor business.
Henry Ford denounced the Jews and ran for senator and sued the Chicago Tribune for libel,
and was the laughingstock of the kept metropolitan press;
but when the metropolitan bankers tried to horn in on his business
he thoroughly outsmarted them.
For Dos Passos, Ford's absurd, rabid racism and oddly obsessive provincial nostalgia (his desire that the whole world be "like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days") coexists with a storyteller's appreciation of his business prowess and the epic change his cars created in the American landscape. Every person is simultaneously great and small, Dos Passos seems to be arguing; every person is at once admirable and hateful. The fact that Ford himself longed for old-fashioned quiet and simplicity, and spent his final years on a restored simulacrum of his father's farm, removed from the noise of his own automobiles, is just the kind of poignant, contradictory detail Dos Passos loves.
The actual "characters" of U.S.A., the ones invented rather than just evoked by Dos Passos, who are the subjects of the trilogy's prose sections, come from a variety of backgrounds, but often work hard to end up in a different part of society than the one in which they started: working-class, middle-America Charley Anderson, for example, gifted with machines and a flying ace in WWI, starts his own aviation company with a friend and ends up wealthy, married to a society girl; meanwhile Mary French, daughter of the Main Line, goes against her mother's wishes and leaves college to be a union organizer and community activist. The common thread, however, is that no matter what Dos Passos characters decide they want, it seldom makes them happy, and they usually end up sabotaging their own efforts in one way or another.
Indeed, the one uniting element of all the U.S.A. characters is that they are slaves to, and undone by, their vices, whether those be for sex, alcohol, social position, or money. The characters who do best both materially and psychologically, like actress Margo Dowling, are usually the most pragmatic, the ones who acknowledge that they're playing a survival game, and look out for themselves and (sometimes) those around them with an utter lack of romanticism. Margo has no grand illusions, especially once she passes the age of about twenty, and that saves her from the pathetic fate of those who keep telling themselves stories about who they are and what they want—stories that get less true all the time. Former golden boy and flying ace Charley Anderson is a particularly pathetic example of the Dos Passos milieu: believing his every whim has a compelling reason behind it (that his lust is love, and his drunken well-being happiness), he descends ever-farther into debt, alienation and alcoholism while telling himself stories about his flying brilliance. Even the activist Mary French, who is probably closest to Dos Passos in her leftist outlook and untiring political work, becomes a victim of her own illusions as she falls in love with a series of condescending, emotionally unavailable fellow activists.
This compulsion, in Dos Passos characters, to let their vices sabotage their dreams didn't bother me as much in the first two books as it did this time around, in The Big Money. I'm not sure if the series actually does become more bitter as it goes along, or whether I've become more sensitive in the ten years since reading the last two books—my guess is that both might be true. It would certainly make sense that, as the country careens toward the crash of 1929, Dos Passos would become more condemnatory of the way Americans were behaving, since he laid the responsibility for the depression of the 1930s squarely on the shoulders of the irresponsible stock market speculators of the 1920s, and on American capitalism as a whole. And it's not that I don't relate to the pattern he lays out—obviously it does happen, and it's a classic setup for a tragedy of the everyday. I just can't help believing that it doesn't happen to everyone—that idealism and dreams, while dangerous as a sole frame of reference, can be an important asset if balanced by practicality.
Despite my qualms about the uniformly miserable characters, though, I remain in awe of Dos Passos's technical verve and audacity, and I love the way he simultaneously creates a broad canvas of events on the national level, and an intimate canvas of regular individuals making their way.
August 31, 2025
اخرین جلد این مجموعه ی بزرگ که طولانی تر هست چ سیر چقتیع هم روند سریع تری دارد.
February 25, 2022
There’s a ton of great reviews on this trilogy without adding my two cents. I will say that I loved these books. Just loved. I’m consistently amazed at all the great literature that exists in the world especially those that have been sitting on my shelf just screaming to me to be read. What the he** was I waiting for??? Nevertheless I finally read and it didn’t disappoint. I can see why so many of the writers I admire and love have called this out as inspiration (Kerouac, Miller, Mailer…just to list 3).
My only suggestion is to try and read them either back-to-back-to-back or at the least, as close together as possible. It really brings out each character and the entirety of the early 20th Century. Highly recommended!
My only suggestion is to try and read them either back-to-back-to-back or at the least, as close together as possible. It really brings out each character and the entirety of the early 20th Century. Highly recommended!
June 2, 2011
Oy vey what a train wreck. The book was torn between Upton Sinclair power to the people proletariatisms and Harold Robbins potboiler men in power and their sins-type sensation. I had to occasionally check the cover to make sure I was still reading Dos Passos.
To be kind this is a Roaring Twenties "Valley of The Dolls" with Mary French as Anne Welles, Eveline Johnson as Jennifer North, and Margo Dowling as Neely O'Hara.
To be kind this is a Roaring Twenties "Valley of The Dolls" with Mary French as Anne Welles, Eveline Johnson as Jennifer North, and Margo Dowling as Neely O'Hara.
October 11, 2011
A classic for a reason. This book (the entire trilogy really) is great writing, great history, and an excellent reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun. The lives of the characters and the times they live in (political unrest, class struggle, get rich quick schemes, war, xenophobia, etc) ring true today. The slang, however, has changed. So yes it's a little dated, but timeless at its core. Loved it.
April 14, 2014
An interesting but not very enjoyable read. I didn’t really feel like there was any one main character in the book, and while the plot follows characters like Charley and Margo the most, the collage of newspaper headings, brief introductions to numerous famous Americans of the era, song snippets, etc., left me with the impression that it is meant to be AMERICA’s story, more than that of any particular American. Or more specifically, the post-WWI to pre-stock market crash America.
The 20’s are an interesting time in American history, and Dos Passos really delves into the glamour and excess, the confidence of America after the war contrasted with the materialistic, doomed future. His characters are for the most part unhappy and not very likable (just my opinion of course) and are largely self-serving and slaves to their own weaknesses/vices. They also provide an interesting contrast between the idea of the American dream and the reality. (Charley, a war hero who makes his way into business, “the self made man,” is also a drunk who uses and abuses women, and Margo, the pretty blond who heads west to become a movie star, was a victim of sexual abuse as a child and uses people relentlessly on her way to the top.)
I did like how Dos Passos alludes to American “mythic” figures, like the Wright Brothers, Isadora Duncan, and Henry Ford. One of the most interesting is the description of the life and death of Rudolph Valentino, and the riots of crazed fans who immortalized him immediately after death. The description of his diseased body in contrast with his image of legendary, silver screen beauty is an interesting metaphor for myth versus the reality that lurks beneath. The newsreels included between sections were very interesting too, and could be viewed as a symbol of the media’s role in that distortion between myth and reality. Many of the headlines that Dos Passos includes are sensational and ugly, but they also show how the press controls/filters what people see and remember of their era. In contrast, the stories of the individuals in The Big Money can be viewed as the realities behind the headlines. (Which is pretty bad considering it ends BEFORE the stock market crash and Great Depression. Yikes.) No wonder Ada says “Oh Mary […] I wish everybody wasn’t so unhappy.”
The 20’s are an interesting time in American history, and Dos Passos really delves into the glamour and excess, the confidence of America after the war contrasted with the materialistic, doomed future. His characters are for the most part unhappy and not very likable (just my opinion of course) and are largely self-serving and slaves to their own weaknesses/vices. They also provide an interesting contrast between the idea of the American dream and the reality. (Charley, a war hero who makes his way into business, “the self made man,” is also a drunk who uses and abuses women, and Margo, the pretty blond who heads west to become a movie star, was a victim of sexual abuse as a child and uses people relentlessly on her way to the top.)
I did like how Dos Passos alludes to American “mythic” figures, like the Wright Brothers, Isadora Duncan, and Henry Ford. One of the most interesting is the description of the life and death of Rudolph Valentino, and the riots of crazed fans who immortalized him immediately after death. The description of his diseased body in contrast with his image of legendary, silver screen beauty is an interesting metaphor for myth versus the reality that lurks beneath. The newsreels included between sections were very interesting too, and could be viewed as a symbol of the media’s role in that distortion between myth and reality. Many of the headlines that Dos Passos includes are sensational and ugly, but they also show how the press controls/filters what people see and remember of their era. In contrast, the stories of the individuals in The Big Money can be viewed as the realities behind the headlines. (Which is pretty bad considering it ends BEFORE the stock market crash and Great Depression. Yikes.) No wonder Ada says “Oh Mary […] I wish everybody wasn’t so unhappy.”
May 15, 2023
This installment takes place entirely in the 1920s. There were several characters who played the stock market, trying to get rich. First published in 1936 in the middle of the Great Depression, I wondered if it would end with the Stock Market Crash in 1929. I'll leave that thought to those who might get to this.
The novel seemed to have more continuity than did the previous two novels. The stories/characterizations followed each other (mostly) so that it was easier to remember them and their circumstances. Charley Anderson reappears. Other characters from the two earlier novels were also present, but not with their own section. One of the "biographies" included Frank Lloyd Wright, but there were also others with whom I was unfamiliar. I suspect those who read this shortly after it came out would have known them.
For the series as a whole, I liked the picture of the US for the period of the early 1900s through the 1920s. No, it is not a history book by any stretch, but it puts flesh on that history. This was my favorite of the series. It won't make it to even my top 25-favorites, but it is a strong 5-stars.
The novel seemed to have more continuity than did the previous two novels. The stories/characterizations followed each other (mostly) so that it was easier to remember them and their circumstances. Charley Anderson reappears. Other characters from the two earlier novels were also present, but not with their own section. One of the "biographies" included Frank Lloyd Wright, but there were also others with whom I was unfamiliar. I suspect those who read this shortly after it came out would have known them.
For the series as a whole, I liked the picture of the US for the period of the early 1900s through the 1920s. No, it is not a history book by any stretch, but it puts flesh on that history. This was my favorite of the series. It won't make it to even my top 25-favorites, but it is a strong 5-stars.
July 25, 2021
در نیوپورت برای خانم های ثروتمند رقصید که در طی رقصش به رباعیات عمر خیام هم گوش می دادند. وقتی هتل وینزور در آتش سوخت همه چمدان ها و همچنین صورتحساب همه بدهی های نپرداخته خود را از کف دادند و با یک کشتی حامل احشام به لندن رفتند تا از مادی گری زادگاهشان آمریکا بپرهیزند...
February 10, 2016
I think “The Big Money” is the best of the “U.S.A.” trilogy (which includes “The 42nd Parallel” and “1919”). I’m not sure if that’s because of the book itself or because of the way reading it with recollection of the prior (which I read in succession just before it) pulls the entire work together.
Essentially, this is the great American epic; “U.S.A.” is actually a perfect overall title. It is, quite literally, the story of life in the USA. It focuses on three decades, the 1900s, the 1910s, and the 1920s in a way that could have been the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s; the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, or any period of time (or more than three decades if an author would have the wherewithal to do it). What’s most significant is something some of the less favorable reviews missed; this is timeless, not dated. Once you tune into the grand scheme, its easy as you read to envision the whole thing being re-told with details from today.
The scheme for the work is subtle and fascinating. At first, I wondered about Do Passos’ seeming focus on one strata of society, the marginal or disaffected. But after having finished the trilogy, I now get it. I find it almost analogous to the scientific method, where you want to observe the impact of X on Y but you want to control for variations in A, B, C, etc. Each decade has its own flavor; the 1900s dominated by class strife and the emergence of the labor movement fading, as it ends, toward the theme of the next decade, which is the Great War, patriotism and loyalty with undercurrents of class struggle persisting (we see even now these underlays as the flavor of one decade doesn’t fully end on the exact last date of that decade) and we see themes of the next decade (money, ambition, partying) taking shape. We also see the variety of ways these larger historical and institutional forces play out on a variety of individuals who start out more or less from the same point but wind up pursuing different paths and reaching different destinations based on – well, I suppose that’s for us to figure out and debate; Innate characteristics? Small variations in environmental details? Luck? All of the above? Some of the above? And by the way, as we get this high-level big-picture vantage point, it’s hard not to notice the workings of the old adage, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Parallels from what we saw then to what we see today are hard not to notice if one can avoid getting too wrapped up in details.
Essentially, this is the great American epic; “U.S.A.” is actually a perfect overall title. It is, quite literally, the story of life in the USA. It focuses on three decades, the 1900s, the 1910s, and the 1920s in a way that could have been the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s; the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, or any period of time (or more than three decades if an author would have the wherewithal to do it). What’s most significant is something some of the less favorable reviews missed; this is timeless, not dated. Once you tune into the grand scheme, its easy as you read to envision the whole thing being re-told with details from today.
The scheme for the work is subtle and fascinating. At first, I wondered about Do Passos’ seeming focus on one strata of society, the marginal or disaffected. But after having finished the trilogy, I now get it. I find it almost analogous to the scientific method, where you want to observe the impact of X on Y but you want to control for variations in A, B, C, etc. Each decade has its own flavor; the 1900s dominated by class strife and the emergence of the labor movement fading, as it ends, toward the theme of the next decade, which is the Great War, patriotism and loyalty with undercurrents of class struggle persisting (we see even now these underlays as the flavor of one decade doesn’t fully end on the exact last date of that decade) and we see themes of the next decade (money, ambition, partying) taking shape. We also see the variety of ways these larger historical and institutional forces play out on a variety of individuals who start out more or less from the same point but wind up pursuing different paths and reaching different destinations based on – well, I suppose that’s for us to figure out and debate; Innate characteristics? Small variations in environmental details? Luck? All of the above? Some of the above? And by the way, as we get this high-level big-picture vantage point, it’s hard not to notice the workings of the old adage, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Parallels from what we saw then to what we see today are hard not to notice if one can avoid getting too wrapped up in details.
March 17, 2015
EUA, anos 20 do Séc. XX. É com uma América a retomar a marcha interrompida pela IGM, numa América com um fosso cada vez maior e chocante entre uma classe média e alta em ascendência galopante embalada pelo canto do dinheiro fácil das Bolsas VS uma classe operária formatada pelo Fordismo e Taylorismo e empurrada para uma luta desigual e romântica contra um capitalismo, em vésperas do Crash de 1929, que Dos Passos encerra a trilogia USA.
"América a nossa nação foi vencida por estranhos que compraram as leis e vedaram os prados e abateram as florestas para pasta de papel e transformaram as nossas cidades amenas em bairros miseráveis e espremeram em suor a riqueza ao nosso povo e quando querem pagam ao carrasco que acciona o interruptor" p. 438
Apesar desta leitura ter constituído uma experiência muito enriquecedora, e muito aconselhável para quem se interesse por esta época e os movimentos de diversa índole que nela surgiram, a meu ver a 5ª estrela não foi alcançada, sobretudo porque é com algum desagrado que ao fim de 1000 e tal páginas acompanhando uma série de personagens que percorrem os três volumes (nuns como principais e noutros como secundárias, tendo algumas só surgido no último) o desfecho para a maior parte delas mostra-se claramente insípido, na verdade nem se pode falar de desfecho, o autor pura e simplesmente abandona-as nas suas rotinas de uma sociedade Americana que encara, e bem, como a História, de resto, viria a provar, de forma muito crítica e negativa, reforçando-se mais uma vez aquela compreensão de que as personagens mais não são do que instrumentos/ retratos de uma Nação num dado tempo, de personagens metafóricas presas em realidades complexas e que, embora, cruzando-se ao longo das décadas continuam a viver sozinhas e incompreendidas em desencantados planos/mundos paralelos.
"América a nossa nação foi vencida por estranhos que compraram as leis e vedaram os prados e abateram as florestas para pasta de papel e transformaram as nossas cidades amenas em bairros miseráveis e espremeram em suor a riqueza ao nosso povo e quando querem pagam ao carrasco que acciona o interruptor" p. 438
Apesar desta leitura ter constituído uma experiência muito enriquecedora, e muito aconselhável para quem se interesse por esta época e os movimentos de diversa índole que nela surgiram, a meu ver a 5ª estrela não foi alcançada, sobretudo porque é com algum desagrado que ao fim de 1000 e tal páginas acompanhando uma série de personagens que percorrem os três volumes (nuns como principais e noutros como secundárias, tendo algumas só surgido no último) o desfecho para a maior parte delas mostra-se claramente insípido, na verdade nem se pode falar de desfecho, o autor pura e simplesmente abandona-as nas suas rotinas de uma sociedade Americana que encara, e bem, como a História, de resto, viria a provar, de forma muito crítica e negativa, reforçando-se mais uma vez aquela compreensão de que as personagens mais não são do que instrumentos/ retratos de uma Nação num dado tempo, de personagens metafóricas presas em realidades complexas e que, embora, cruzando-se ao longo das décadas continuam a viver sozinhas e incompreendidas em desencantados planos/mundos paralelos.
July 12, 2023
Hands down, the best three books I've read all year. Amazing writing from Dos Passos, downright courageous, given the time in which these were written. I'll be sending off for my Library of America hardcover of the entire trilogy in a single volume, and will dig into this many more times before my eyes are done with their work.
I'll be digging up his other work as well.
Highly recommended.
I'll be digging up his other work as well.
Highly recommended.
July 5, 2023
Dos Passos concludes his portrait of modernity with its breathless activity and discordant cacophony.
March 22, 2023
USA..roughly 100 years ago. That was the subject of the 'USA' trilogy by John Dos Passos, but for him it was the recent past. 'The Big Money' is the 3rd and final installment. As I try to understand the USA of today it is instructive to look back on those days--by someone who was actually there. There is no question these were pivotal years in the formation of 'modern' America. As I noted in the my review of book 2, '1919' the outcome of the Great War (later known as 'World War I') was a calamity for international relations. Far from being the 'war to end all wars' it became the war that directly spawned WW2 and thence the Cold War and the American Empire that may one day be viewed as a calamity for the entire world given the trends that seem to emerge from this place. Interestingly, I just read in another book about who first came up with the term 'World War 1'. It was Ernst Haeckel (German biologist and ecologist) who said "there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word," written on September 20, 1914. Anyway, the war was a disaster for America in many ways too as governmental overeach and suspension of civil liberties became rampant, setting an example that continues to this day in myriad new ways. But now we are in the 1920's (but Roaring? the term is never used in Dos Passos' USA) and the human drama of life in America is on display once again. It is fun to see Miami, FL in its infancy and LA with orchards. But the rich, the poor, and the striving are all trying to make some sense of their lives. The characters are fewer and there is a little more continuity of these generally sordid lives--Charly Anderson, Margo Dowling, Mary French and a bit of Dicks Ellsworth, along with numerous lesser hangers on. All are generally unhappy for a variety of reasons--love, alcohol, money, fate. The fact that it was Prohibition seems to have negligible effect on the consumption and availability of alcohol. Only the labor activist Mary French engenders much sympathy. The fundamental tension of 'USA' is the divide between the working class and what we might call the 'elite' class today. While his sympathies are clearly with the working man and their struggle, Dos Passos mostly focuses on the lives of the those struggling the 'make it' to the elite class which always seems to elude them. These are not tidy lives--with excessive drinking (and driving), frequent economic uncertainty and ruin, even rape and abortion. Is it much different today? We have new and even more sinister pathways and perversions. Once again I enjoyed the mini-bios, among them Frderick Winslow Taylor (founder of 'Scientific Management'), Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen ('The Theory of the Leisure Class'), Isadora Duncan, Rudolf Valentino, the Wright Brothers, Samuel Insull. I have actually read full biographies on three of them and obviously you see how Dos Passos has to simplify things, but they are still valuable toward an fuller picture of the period. I found Veblen's ideas on 'conspicuous consumption' to be particularly prophetic.
September 19, 2021
Finis coronat opus. Highly recommended.
April 4, 2013
This past weekend, I finally finished The Big Money, the final book in John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy which began with The 42nd Parallel and 1919. I started reading the series because it kept showing up on lists of must-read 20th century literature. It probably belongs on them but not because it's especially profound or moving. Instead, it's a vivid picture (with a heavy socialist tint) of everyday American life in the years between McKinley's assassination and the stock market crash.
Dos Passos employs an unusual narrative structure which has an almost Cubist effect, revealing the world from a variety of distances and perspectives. The bulk of the work is a set of chapters that each focus on one of about a dozen characters, telling their stories from childhood onward. These stories are punctuated by the so-called "Newsreels," collages of headlines, news story fragments and snatches of lyrics of popular songs, that are sometimes reminiscent of Burroughs' fold-ins. The Newsreels provide both a sense of time and an immediate historical context. A deeper cultural and mythical context is provided by a set of biographies of important figures of the time beginning with Eugene Debs, proceeding through the likes of J.P. Morgan and Joe Hill, Henry Ford and Isadora Duncan, and ending with a nameless vagrant. Interspersed with these three narrative forms is a fourth obscure set of chapters that come under the heading "Camera Eye" and provide Dos Passos' impressions of various times of his own life. These are given without background or explanation but provide an immediacy absent from the rest of the book.
The tone throughout the trilogy is one of sustained bitterness. The individual characters lead eventful, but troubled and unsatisfying lives- WWI is actually a bright spot for most of them- which is probably why Sartre held the series in high esteem. At the outset there is some hope in the goals of the Wobblies. But while they are prominent in The 42nd Parallel, they've faded to irrelevance by the beginning of the third book. This process was helped along by mass arrests by Woodrow Wilson, documented in his own biography titled "Meester Veelson." This scathing chapter situated at the center of 1919 is in many ways the heart of the whole trilogy, highlighting Wilson's betrayal of his own ideals with a list of the efforts at reform he abandoned throughout his life. It is perhaps only outshined by the biography that appears at the end of 1919 titled "The Body of an American Soldier."
After the powerful conclusion of the second book, The Big Money initially felt perfunctory. I can't say that feeling completely disappeared by the end of the book, but Dos Passos managed to allay most of it by avoiding the predictable dramatic climax synchronized with the stock market crash. In fact, that event is barely mentioned in one of the last Newsreels. In the meantime, the stories of the various individual characters all sputter to unremarkable (though frequently premature) endings. The anger of the first two books is replaced with quiet resignation, which is probably the most fitting response to the first three decades of the 20th century in the United States.
Dos Passos employs an unusual narrative structure which has an almost Cubist effect, revealing the world from a variety of distances and perspectives. The bulk of the work is a set of chapters that each focus on one of about a dozen characters, telling their stories from childhood onward. These stories are punctuated by the so-called "Newsreels," collages of headlines, news story fragments and snatches of lyrics of popular songs, that are sometimes reminiscent of Burroughs' fold-ins. The Newsreels provide both a sense of time and an immediate historical context. A deeper cultural and mythical context is provided by a set of biographies of important figures of the time beginning with Eugene Debs, proceeding through the likes of J.P. Morgan and Joe Hill, Henry Ford and Isadora Duncan, and ending with a nameless vagrant. Interspersed with these three narrative forms is a fourth obscure set of chapters that come under the heading "Camera Eye" and provide Dos Passos' impressions of various times of his own life. These are given without background or explanation but provide an immediacy absent from the rest of the book.
The tone throughout the trilogy is one of sustained bitterness. The individual characters lead eventful, but troubled and unsatisfying lives- WWI is actually a bright spot for most of them- which is probably why Sartre held the series in high esteem. At the outset there is some hope in the goals of the Wobblies. But while they are prominent in The 42nd Parallel, they've faded to irrelevance by the beginning of the third book. This process was helped along by mass arrests by Woodrow Wilson, documented in his own biography titled "Meester Veelson." This scathing chapter situated at the center of 1919 is in many ways the heart of the whole trilogy, highlighting Wilson's betrayal of his own ideals with a list of the efforts at reform he abandoned throughout his life. It is perhaps only outshined by the biography that appears at the end of 1919 titled "The Body of an American Soldier."
After the powerful conclusion of the second book, The Big Money initially felt perfunctory. I can't say that feeling completely disappeared by the end of the book, but Dos Passos managed to allay most of it by avoiding the predictable dramatic climax synchronized with the stock market crash. In fact, that event is barely mentioned in one of the last Newsreels. In the meantime, the stories of the various individual characters all sputter to unremarkable (though frequently premature) endings. The anger of the first two books is replaced with quiet resignation, which is probably the most fitting response to the first three decades of the 20th century in the United States.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 22, 2010
I'm so glad I finally got to read DosPassos. There's not much I can say about "The Big Money" (volume 3 of the USA trilogy) that hasn't already been said by all sorts of people much smarter than me, over the past several decades. In "The Big Money" DosPassos captures the spirit of a generation- the "lost generation"- as the lives of several characters intersect and intertwine in the years between the end of the First World War and the crash of 1929. Looking back from DosPassos' perspective at the time of writing, it seems like the 1929 crash and the ensuing Depression were a judgement, of sorts, on American society: paying the piper for years of crass materialism, empty satisfaction of material and physical wants (wealth, sex, and booze), and the betrayal of the American dream: no longer was wealth- even mere security- obtained through work and innovation; rather, through manipulation of financial markets and abuse of credit. (I know! I know! History is repeating itself!) There's nothing like a traditional plot here: DosPassos' characters simply drift through the decade, experiencing the base thrills and degradation that the America's economy and society had to offer. DosPassos uses some innovative techniques to tie everything together and provide social/political/economic context to the book- including "Newsreel" chapters containing snippets from headlines and news stories, stream-of-consciousness "Camera Eye" bits presenting his themes in stark relief, and- most interestingly- mini-biographies of prominent Americans of the era (Henry Ford, Frederick Taylor, Frank Lloyd Wright, others) who helped shape the first decades of "The American Century." DosPassos uses the Sacco and Vanzetti case- with which he was personally involved- as a simulacrum of the demise of the American working class, and the ultimate victory of the financiers. Powerful stuff. I'm going to read more.
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June 19, 2008I was barely 13 and reading the headiest book I’d ever encountered: John Dos Passos’ trilogy, USA. Over 1200 pages long, I discovered an America I never knew existed, an America hidden from the children of the Cold War, not in our history books or bedtime stories, and I fell in love with the spirit of Socialism. I longed for a copy, a real paper copy of the Worker. I read Marx and understood little. I believed firmly in the power of the labor unions though I’d never met a union worker. I moaned about living in the wrong time period and wanting to be alive in the 30’s when people talked about real things and real issues. I was insufferable, with just enough information to drive everyone around me insane.
One night at supper, my father silently handed me a book of poetry. I began reading it at the supper table and tears streamed down my face. It was the beginning of another intellectual journey, one taken too soon to realize the mark it’d leave on my soul. The author’s words that moved me were these:
I am past thirty. I fear the nights.
I hunch the sheet with my knees.
I bury my face in the pillow, shamelessly weeping,
That I have squandered my life on little nothings
And in the morning will squander it again.
I Journeyed through Russia
By Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I have the battered paperback of Bratsk Station and other new poems still, and found it tonight tucked on a shelf with my other classics. I picked it up and read the first entry again. Its words as familiar as a psalm to me, I wondered at the wisdom of my father. Did he know what he had given me? Did he understand the balance it would give my heart, or did he simply find a book of poetry in a box of books he’d bought and think I’d enjoy reading it? I’m sure he doesn’t remember giving me the book with a profile of a mysterious Russian author on the front.
One night at supper, my father silently handed me a book of poetry. I began reading it at the supper table and tears streamed down my face. It was the beginning of another intellectual journey, one taken too soon to realize the mark it’d leave on my soul. The author’s words that moved me were these:
I am past thirty. I fear the nights.
I hunch the sheet with my knees.
I bury my face in the pillow, shamelessly weeping,
That I have squandered my life on little nothings
And in the morning will squander it again.
I Journeyed through Russia
By Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I have the battered paperback of Bratsk Station and other new poems still, and found it tonight tucked on a shelf with my other classics. I picked it up and read the first entry again. Its words as familiar as a psalm to me, I wondered at the wisdom of my father. Did he know what he had given me? Did he understand the balance it would give my heart, or did he simply find a book of poetry in a box of books he’d bought and think I’d enjoy reading it? I’m sure he doesn’t remember giving me the book with a profile of a mysterious Russian author on the front.
April 25, 2022
An interesting, engaging, historical fiction novel set in the USA. The book has four threads, three being non fiction. The fourth thread includes the narratives of five men and women. Charley Anderson, an aviator mechanic, airman, businessman / investor, (a main character in '1919'), still drinking and womanising; Margo Dowling, an independent beautiful woman with many male friends and some lovers who wants to be a successful actress; Mary French, a unionist who mixes with men involved in organising working class strikes; Richard Savage, a Harvard graduate and fairly successful public relations employee, (a main character in '1919'); They all find it difficult to be interested in starting a family, mostly living for the present day.
The other three, much shorter non fiction modes of address are ‘The Camera Eye’ where the author writes about his own life experiences is a little difficult to comprehend. ‘Newsreels’ which are actual headlines from newspapers of the time, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans and popular song lyrics. The third mode of address is brief lives of some of the important characters of the times including Frederick Winslow Taylor, (a consulting engineer in management), Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora O'Gorman Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, the Wright brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Randolph Hearst and Samuel Insull.
A interesting portrayal of the USA in the 1920s. Dos Passos certainly writes with a feeling of anger for the exploited, poverty stricken working class man. Whilst there is no plot, there is good reading momentum. Each character’s life is eventful.
A satisfying, interesting reading experience.
This book was first published in 1936 and is the third book in a trilogy titled ‘USA’. (less)
The other three, much shorter non fiction modes of address are ‘The Camera Eye’ where the author writes about his own life experiences is a little difficult to comprehend. ‘Newsreels’ which are actual headlines from newspapers of the time, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans and popular song lyrics. The third mode of address is brief lives of some of the important characters of the times including Frederick Winslow Taylor, (a consulting engineer in management), Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora O'Gorman Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, the Wright brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Randolph Hearst and Samuel Insull.
A interesting portrayal of the USA in the 1920s. Dos Passos certainly writes with a feeling of anger for the exploited, poverty stricken working class man. Whilst there is no plot, there is good reading momentum. Each character’s life is eventful.
A satisfying, interesting reading experience.
This book was first published in 1936 and is the third book in a trilogy titled ‘USA’. (less)
September 7, 2022
The style that I found so unique in The 42nd Parallel and 1919 was still present in The Big Money, the final installment in John Dos Passos's USA trilogy. But the narrative itself began to grow a bit stale, I think in part because the author had already begun losing his passion. Dos Passos, who in 1917 had declared "Every day I become more red," was at this stage hastening his gradual move to the right in social and political matters, having declared to Edmund Wilson in 1930 that he was becoming a "middle-class liberal" and by 1934 beginning to align with the "Ango Saxon chauvinist" attitudes of his father.
From the publication of The 42nd Parallel in 1930 to The Big Money in 1936, it is as if the USA trilogy had been finished by a completely different author from the one that started it. The optimism of the earlier work had changed to pessimism, the idealism of youth was replaced by a crusty curmudgeonly attitude, something noted by critics at the time.
Whereas I flipped through the first two books with ease and interest, The Big Money, though still a marvel in style, became somewhat of a slog. Aside from some fascinating historical bits, like the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, the book had lost much of the magic that made the first two installments so special. It seemed that Dos Passos was already in a state of giving up, if not yet on writing then at least in believing in those ideals that added passionate fuel to the earlier installments of his trailblazing USA trilogy.
From the publication of The 42nd Parallel in 1930 to The Big Money in 1936, it is as if the USA trilogy had been finished by a completely different author from the one that started it. The optimism of the earlier work had changed to pessimism, the idealism of youth was replaced by a crusty curmudgeonly attitude, something noted by critics at the time.
Whereas I flipped through the first two books with ease and interest, The Big Money, though still a marvel in style, became somewhat of a slog. Aside from some fascinating historical bits, like the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, the book had lost much of the magic that made the first two installments so special. It seemed that Dos Passos was already in a state of giving up, if not yet on writing then at least in believing in those ideals that added passionate fuel to the earlier installments of his trailblazing USA trilogy.
December 31, 2019
Re The USA Trilogy. I found this plotless depiction of Dos Passo's fictional characters set during the 1st three decades of the 20th century to be fascinating. The author reveals everyday people of almost all stripes, during a time of momentous change in the country as well as the world, and shows how they simply cope with their lives, and how they try to make it in an America that was full of opportunity, but yet, still full of the vicissitudes life always presents - the inevitable disappointments, heartbreaks, frustrations and difficulties that everyone faces, no matter how hard we all try to avoid them.
Especially interesting to me was just the way it seems so many people at that time lived, scrambling to be 'successful', while apparently not ever thinking too much about what that meant. And no PC stuff here, people just did and said whatever they thought, as long as it seemed, they were accompanied by prodigious amounts of booze to help them along the way. Essentially, this is a snapshot of a way of life long gone in America's history. Again, it was fascinating to experience it, even vicariously.
Especially interesting to me was just the way it seems so many people at that time lived, scrambling to be 'successful', while apparently not ever thinking too much about what that meant. And no PC stuff here, people just did and said whatever they thought, as long as it seemed, they were accompanied by prodigious amounts of booze to help them along the way. Essentially, this is a snapshot of a way of life long gone in America's history. Again, it was fascinating to experience it, even vicariously.
February 16, 2010
I think the best of the three in the USA trilogy, although I may have just gotten used to the style. The four different writing styles, or viewpoints, help paint the picture of the era. The newsreels, the stream of consciousness, the narrative fiction and camera eye all are a bit different but add to the panorama Dos Passos is painting of the era. Sometimes I would have to remember that this wasn’t a recently written work attempting to imagine the “old days”. Dos Passos was writing about his current period and attempting to capture the entire feel of the time. You have any interest in 1910-1931 America? Then you must read this trilogy. Otherwise, your interest isn’t serious. I say this was the best of the three works because the characters in the fictional narratives are in more tense situations, heading towards either victory or calamity. The narratives about historical figures are also interesting although I have no idea how accurate were his portrayals.
November 22, 2016
This book pulled together all the big players and the big events. I have to say that I wanted a little more earth shattering event around the stock market. But I learned about a lot of people and attitudes that were happening during this time.
I would like to remind puerile that the author was a socialist. But he also changed his position on that! I think that is important, because names can be so divisive.
I think some follow up links or people:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scien...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernes...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_T...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conso...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samue...
I would like to remind puerile that the author was a socialist. But he also changed his position on that! I think that is important, because names can be so divisive.
I think some follow up links or people:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scien...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernes...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_T...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conso...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samue...
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