John Dos Passos Books

Easton Press John Dos Passos books:
The Shackles of Power by John Dos Passos - Library of American History - 1988
The 42nd Parallel - Library of Famous Editions - 1994

Franklin Library John Dos Passos books:
1919 - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1978

The 42nd Parallel - The U.S.A. Trilogy Book 1
With his U.S.A. trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money, John Dos Passos is said by many to have written the great American novel. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultivating what Edmund Wilson once called their "own little corners," John Dos Passos was taking on the world. Counted as one of the best novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library and by some of the finest writers working today, U.S.A. is a grand, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation, buzzing with history and life on every page.

The trilogy opens with The 42nd Parallel, where we find a young country at the dawn of the twentieth century. Slowly, in stories artfully spliced together, the lives and fortunes of five characters unfold. Mac, Janey, Eleanor, Ward, and Charley are caught on the storm track of this parallel and blown New Yorkward. As their lives cross and double back again, the likes of Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie make cameo appearances.


1919 - The U.S.A. Trilogy Book 2
With 1919 , the second volume of his U.S.A . trilogy, John Dos Passos continues his "vigorous and sweeping panorama of twentieth-century America" ( Forum ), lauded on publication of the first volume not only for its scope, but also for its groundbreaking style.

Again, employing a host of experimental devices that would inspire a whole new generation of writers to follow, Dos Passos captures the many textures, flavors, and background noises of modern life with a cinematic touch and unparalleled nerve.

1919 opens to find America and the world at war, and Dos Passos's characters, many of whom we met in the first volume, are thrown into the snarl. We follow the daughter of a Chicago minister, a wide-eyed Texas girl, a young poet, a radical Jew, and we glimpse Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Unknown Soldier. 1919 provides an incomparable portrait of America from the turn of the century to the Depression of 1929.

The Shackles of Power: Three Jeffersonian Decades
As much a general chronicle of the years 1807 to 1831, as a biography, it is a historical montage that interweaves the story of Jefferson with other figures of the era.