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    A Study Guide for John Dos Passos's "U.S.A."
    A Study Guide for John Dos Passos's "U.S.A."
    A Study Guide for John Dos Passos's "U.S.A."
    Ebook49 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for John Dos Passos's "U.S.A."

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for John Dos Passos's "U.S.A.," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535842013
    A Study Guide for John Dos Passos's "U.S.A."

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for John Dos Passos's "U.S.A." - Gale

      1

      U.S.A.

      John Dos Passos

      1938

      Introduction

      John Dos Passos wrote the three novels that make up the trilogy U.S.A. between 1927 and 1936, drawing on his own childhood and education, his service in the ambulance corps during World War I, and his left-wing political views of current events. The trilogy was first published as a whole in 1938. Dos Passos aimed to produce a satire on American life, permeated with popular songs, current events, and headlines, that would truly portray the whole of American culture and events. The trilogy spans the years from the opening of the twentieth century through the dawn of the Great Depression and expresses Dos Passos's view of the ill effects of capitalism on the American people.

      The trilogy is notable for Dos Passos's use of various experimental techniques, such as the Camera Eye, a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues that are inserted throughout the chapters; the Newsreels, collages of headlines, lines from popular songs and pieces of current events; and twenty-seven biographies of typical or important people of the time. He had first developed some of these techniques in his earlier work, Manhattan Transfer, his first novel to receive widespread readership and critical attention. In using them, he was inspired by such disparate sources as the poems of Walt Whitman, the fragmented images of postimpressionist painting, James Joyce's Ulysses, and silent filmmakers D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, who used montage, or contrasting scenes, to portray the busy and often ironic contrasts of the real world.

      These techniques brought praise from critics of the time. Dos Passos's style of emphasizing history and current events in his narrative and his striving to produce an all-encompassing portrait of the America of his time influenced many later writers of the twentieth century, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, and E. L. Doctorow.

      Author Biography

      John Dos Passos was born on January 14, 1896, in Chicago, Illinois, the son of John Randolph Dos Passos, a wealthy attorney, and Lucy Spriggs Madison. His parents were not married, and Dos Passos spent most of his youth traveling throughout Europe and the United States with his mother; he later recalled having a hotel childhood. He graduated from Harvard University in 1916 and served in the ambulance corps during World War I. His first novel, One Man's Initiation: 1917, was published in 1917, but his writing didn't receive widespread attention until the publication of his second novel, Three Soldiers (1921), which was based on his war experiences and intended to present a truthful portrayal of the horrors of war rather than the glorified, romanticized images other writers had provided.

      He followed this with Manhattan Transfer (1925) and then began writing the massive U.S.A., a trilogy intended to give readers a comprehensive, realistic view of American society from the turn of the twentieth century to the stock market crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression. The trilogy, which Dos Passos viewed as an indictment of American society, was made up of the novels 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) and was first published as a whole in 1938.

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