Friday, September 28, 2007

The Great American Novel

My nomination, the USA trilogy. Not much read today -- but there's nothing like it.
Dos Passos and U.S.A.

On this day in 1970 John Dos Passos died at the age of seventy-four. He is now one of the more forgotten Lost Generation writers, but the U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money, published 1930-36) was important reading in the forties and fifties, both for its angry indictment of the "prosperity myth" and its style. Influenced by Joyce, Dos Passos incorporated a 'stream-of-society' technique into his best fiction: "newsreels" (pastiches of headlines, popular songs, etc.), biography (of the economic elite, juxtaposed against the radicals and downtrodden), personal memory, and roving, "camera eye" passages. The cumulative effect is difficult to capture,
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