Unique among American books for its epic scope and panoramic social sweep U.S.A. has long been
acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. Now The Library of America presents an exclusive
one-volume edition of this enduring masterwork by John Dos Passos including for the first time
detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events that serve as a backdrop. In the novels that
make up the trilogy-The 42nd Parallel 1919 and The Big Money-Dos Passos creates an
unforgettable collective portrait of America shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant
social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time
with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most
compulsively readable of modern classics. A startling range of experimental devices captures
the textures and background noises of twentieth-century life: Newsreels with blaring headlines
autobiographical Camera Eye sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness biographies evoking
emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan Henry Ford John Reed Frank Lloyd Wright
Thorstein Veblen and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling
power tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the
Depression. The U.S.A. trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising
executives sailors and stenographers interior decorators and movie stars. Their crisscrossing
destinies take in wars and revolutions desperate love affairs and harrowing family crises
corrupt public triumphs and private catastrophes in settings that include the trenches of
World War I insurgent Mexico Hollywood studios in the silent era Wall Street boardrooms and
the tumultuous streets of Boston just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The volume
contains newly researched chronologies of Dos Passos's life and of world events cited in U.S.A.
notes and an essay on textual selection. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit
cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing
and keeping permanently in print America's best and most significant writing. The Library of
America series includes more than 300 volumes to date authoritative editions that average 1
000 pages in length feature cloth covers sewn bindings and ribbon markers and are printed
on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
