If Dos Passos has omitted the class struggle […] it is only the external class struggle he has left out; within his characters the class struggle is going on constantly.
Books U.S.A.
- Author
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John Dos Passos
- Year
- 1938
- Publisher
- Harcourt Brace
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It lacks any touch of eccentricity; it is startlingly normal; at the risk of seeming paradoxical one might say that it is exciting because of its quality of cliché: here are comprised the judgments about modern American life that many of us have been living on for years.
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U.S.A. foists itself on you with the same eat-your-greens-this-is-good-for-you assertiveness. Dos Passos’s trilogy is at the bottom of the list of books I’d like to read again […] but I am glad that I read it.
Lionel Trilling
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In the biographies, in the newsreels, and even the narrative, I aimed at total objectivity by giving conflicting views—using the camera eye as a safety valve for my own subjective feelings. It made objectivity in the rest of the book much easier.
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Whatever else it is or isn’t, U.S.A. is an epic of modern American loneliness, of people in transit from somewhere that hasn’t worked out to somewhere else, where things may be better.
Our Thoughts
In the end, this is probably the best American novel. Not the most fun, certainly, but its seemingly detached and clean reportage exudes the empathy (and despair) of someone who deeply cares what it means to be human and, more importantly, American.
— Brian Flanagan
Ragtime
Bound for Glory
Main Street