Novel
The 42nd Parallel
John Dos Passos · 1930
Synopsis
Five lives, from 1900 to the entry into the war in 1917: Mac, a typesetter of Irish origin who turns to revolutionary syndicalism and leaves for Mexico in revolution; Janey, a stenographer; J. Ward Moorehouse, a public relations man, whose secretary she becomes; Eleanor Stoddard, daughter of a Chicago slaughterhouse worker; Charley Anderson, a mechanic from North Dakota. Between the chapters are interspersed lives of real men, from Debs to La Follette, collages of newspaper headlines and refrains, and fragments in which a consciousness notes what it sees, from childhood to Harvard.
Context
The volume appears from Harper in 1930; two others follow, and the three are brought together in 1938 under the title U.S.A., with a new prologue. The collages in this volume are drawn from the Chicago Tribune before 1917. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that he considered Dos Passos the greatest writer of his time, and acknowledged having used his techniques of simultaneity for his own cycle of novels.
Who it is for
A long novel, the first part of a trilogy; four kinds of text alternate without transition. Translated into French by Norbert Guterman as early as 1933.
Prizes and reception
The whole trilogy is ranked twenty-third among the hundred best English-language novels of the century by the Modern Library, in 1998.
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