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51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant, overlooked work of American fiction, April 14, 2006
When I first came across John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) as a teenager I thought they were the most exciting books I'd read to date. I was enthralled by its scope, its style, and its highly politicized substance. Dos Passos' montage-style (that seemed to be some sort of homage to the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein) mixed interwoven story lines of fictional characters with brief contemporary biographies of famous contemporaries. To that he added "newsreel" items, brief inserts from news clippings of the day that gave some sense of the cultural and political world these characters inhabited. Last, Dos Passos added subjective, autobiographical snippets (the "Camera Eye") that served as some sort of exterior voice of the author. I was concerned when I picked up 42nd Parallel many years later that I would find that my excitement was more the product of teenage naivete than from reading a truly unique literary work. Happily, I was not disappointed to find that the USA Trilogy remains for me, a wonderful piece of writing, one that has fallen inexplicably out of the American literary cannon.
Seventy years later we think of American fiction from the 1920s and 1930s as being dominated by three writers, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. It is not much remembered that at the time Dos Passos was thought of as an essential fourth. When 42nd Parallel was published Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Upon publication of The Big Money in 1936 Dos Passos made the cover of the August 10, 1936 issue of Time Magazine.
42nd Parallel is a wonderful title for Volume I of the Trilogy. The 42nd Parallel of latitude runs right through the heart of the USA. Starting from the west it forms the north/south boundary of California, Nevada and part of Utah from Oregon and Idaho. Running east it crosses Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and the New York/Pennsylvania border. After cutting across Connecticut it reaches the Atlantic Ocean just where the Pilgrims landed, at Plymouth Rock.
Dos Passos' 42nd Parallel cuts a similar swath across the USA. Set roughly in the years from 1900 to the First World War, Dos Passos traces the lives of five characters, each from a different part of the country and each with a different class and cultural background. We are presented with the stories of Fainy McCreary (Mac), Janey, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eleanor Stoddard, and Charley Anderson. As the stories progress they converge (personally or geographically) and diverge sometimes as randomly as two ships passing in the night. We have a range of characters from a card carrying member of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies) in Mac to a budding man of wealth and importance in the new field of public relations (Moorehouse). Some hop trains and tramp from town to town looking for jobs or social unrest. Others strive for respectability and try to make a `nice' middle class life for themselves.
In between chapters Dos Passos provides us with biographical sketches of famed Americans such as Thomas Edison, Bob La Follette, Andrew Carnegie, and Luther Burbank. Also interspersed throughout the book are the Newsreels and what Dos Passos called "The Camera Eye" made up of his own musings on his life and times. All of the fictional characters live for the moment and don't engage in any literary musings on the meaning of life and their role in it. The Camera Eye seems, in many respects, to consist of Dos Passos setting out his own interior life, something missing from his characters. 42nd Parallel is a politically charged piece of work and is fully representative of the highly charged and turbulent early years of the 20th-century.
By the time I was finished with the 42nd Parallel any qualms I had about revisiting Dos Passos had long since evaporated. I recommend this book to anyone who, like me, read the book many, many years ago. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who hasn't yet discovered The USA Trilogy. You won't be disappointed.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A realisitc and unforgiving look at America before WWI., November 18, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: 42nd Parallel (Hardcover)
This is the first volume of the USA trilogy. It takes some effort to read because of the innovative form the author uses to relate what America was like before WWI. He centers his book around the lives of several central characters and their adventures. Interspersed biographies of famous Americans like Henry Ford are fascinating. The illustrations by (I can't remember the artist's name) are American classics and are of great value in appreciating the text. The 42nd Parallel was known as the major storm path across North America. Dos Passos tracks the gritty lives of the working and middle class Americans with whom he identifies. His detailed map of our national life shows the great divide between our material well-being today and the struggle for existence waged by working class Americans before the New Deal. Great characterizations and descriptions of early 20th century USA.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A parallel America, February 15, 2005
"The 42nd Parallel," the first volume of John Dos Passos's "U.S.A." trilogy, is a novel about America and Americans from the 1890s up to the first World War. That sounds ordinary enough, but "The 42nd Parallel"--the title possibly refers to the latitude of Chicago, Dos Passos's city of birth and where a good portion of the action of the novel takes place--is notable more for its style than for its content, not that the latter is uninteresting. Dos Passos invents five young people from different backgrounds and parts of the country and follows the courses of their lives until their destinies eventually intersect.
The first to be introduced is a poor kid from Connecticut by way of Chicago named Fenian "Mac" McCreary who, starting out as an apprentice printer not unlike Benjamin Franklin, travels from city to city hopping trains and falling haplessly into a variety of odd jobs--assisting a con man, writing propaganda for a labor organization--until he ends up in Mexico running a bookstore on the fringe of a revolutionary movement. Then we meet Janey Williams, a middle-class girl from Washington, D.C., who makes a living as a stenographer while she is looking for a husband.
Next is a diligent, intelligent boy from Wilmington, Delaware, named J. Ward Moorehouse who after some bad luck in his career and his marriage becomes a successful public relations consultant for corporations. Eleanor Stoddard, a Chicago girl who dreams of a fashionable and cultured life for herself, breaks the social and economic barriers and becomes a highly reputable interior decorator in New York. Finally, Charley Anderson, a North Dakota native, struggles to find and keep work as a mechanic while he roams the country as a vagrant, ultimately volunteering for the ambulance corps in France as the United States enters the European war.
What all these people have in common is that they each epitomize some facet of the new American socioeconomic picture of the emerging twentieth century--the socialist, the working single girl, the corporate image softener. The novel reflects the changes America was undergoing at the time, especially in light of the problematic relations between labor, industry, and government, and the country's potential position as a new global superpower awaiting the biggest, bloodiest war the world would witness to date. Dos Passos wrote this in 1930, so of course he had the benefit of some hindsight; there was no second world war, nor even yet the threat of one, to obscure his vision of the era.
The narratives of the main characters alternate with "Newsreels" that provide glimpses of contemporary events, headlines, and snippets of popular songs; sections called "The Camera Eye" which record random prattle from snapshot subjects and look like modernist prose poems; and brief versified sketches of actual personalities and prominent figures of the day who shaped American history, from Eugene V. Debs to Thomas Edison to Charles Proteus Steinmetz. The novel is experimental in structure, but Dos Passos is breezily conversational in his prose, telling pure stories with natural drama; there is no unbelievable comedy or tragedy here, no sentimentality or jingoism, just life as it is lived.
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