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.
