Bøger af John Dos Passos

A Tale of Ambition, Politics, and Power A Masterpiece of Modernist Fiction and Urban Realism From the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, John Dos Passos takes readers through a collage of characters chasing the American Dream, engulfed by the frenetic pace of New York's industrial expansion. Love, loss, and alienation unify the disparate characters against a thinly veiled critique of American capitalism. Published in 1925, this experimental novel combines innovative stream of consciousness with fragmented narratives adopted from a cinematic perspective. Dos Passos's panoramic literary style has inspired generations of writers.

First published in 1925, "Manhattan Transfer" by American author John Dos Passos is an engrossing portrayal of urban life in New York City from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age. Critically acclaimed and widely considered to be his most important work, Dos Passos tells the story of the city as it grows and changes through the perspectives of many of its inhabitants. The city itself is a central character of the novel. It is exciting and glamorous, but also indifferent and often cruel to its citizens. The novel is told as a series of stories of interconnected groups, couples, and individuals as they navigate an urban landscape that is becoming more crowded and modern. The characters from many different walks of life are followed through both their ordinary daily life of marriage, children, and jobs and are also captured in the midst of their complicated dramas, tragedies, betrayals, successes, and defeats. Dos Passos was influenced by the detailed style and modern tone of James Joyce's "Ulysses" and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" when writing "Manhattan Transfer" and he succeeds in capturing both a people and a place in the midst of a great transformation. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer follows the overlapping lives of four principal characters in a sweeping multi-faceted tale set to the soundtrack of the booming, rhythmic pulse of New York City in the 1920s. Peopled with wealthy professionals, struggling immigrants, actors, cab drivers, chefs, and shopkeepers, a portrait of New York City bursts into view with all the force of the city itself. Through a narrative collage of descriptions, snatches of conversations, music, flashbacks, streams of consciousness, and shifting perspectives, Dos Passos vividly portrays the profits and perils of the American dream. Considered by many to be his greatest novel, Manhattan Transfer is a landmark work of modernist fiction and a masterpiece of American literature.

Three young American soldiers are drafted in military and sent to France. But each has a reason to despise the war and to desert his post. What transpires next is a story of frustration, survival, betrayal and tragedy. The novel was inspired by author's own experiences during World War I. Passoswas an ambulance driver for American volunteer groups in Paris and Italy, before joining the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Despite sickness in the final years of his life, Dos Passos presses on for adventure. He and his wife journey to Easter Island, where they explore the history behind the famous statues-called maois. "When I was a small boy," Dos Passos says, "some kind person took me to the British Museum. There I saw a statue, a huge, rough, dark-gray statue with [a] long, sad, dark-gray face. The statue stared back out of deep, sunken eyes. What was it trying to say? To this day I can remember the feeling it gave me of savage, brooding melancholy."

Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence, and the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine on ordinary soldiers."It is unquestionably the best war story yet produced in America and I have every confidence that it will make a sensation" - H. L. Mencken

The book "" The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking People , has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies and hence the text is clear and readable.

Eight Harvard Poets , has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Since its 1925 publication, Manhattan Transfer has been widely recognized as a landmark in American modernism both for its jaundiced portrayal of the American Dream and for its experimentation with the novel form. Clear, factual annotations by the world's leading expert on Dos Passos's fi ction guides readers through the novel's dense representation of life in New York City during the turbulent early decades of the new century.

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.

In this semi-autobiographical novel, an American named Roland Lancaster has a doomed affair with a younger woman, Elsa, in Cuba during World War II. The love story, in its happiest moments, parallels the idyllic life that author John Dos Passos had with his first wife, Katy. The Great Days plots a key concern of the author''s in the 1950s-America''s rise to global prominence during World War II, and its loss of power in the years following the peace. In preparing the novel, Dos Passos studied James V. Forrestal, Secretary of Defense from 1947 to 1949. In his notes on the novel, he quotes Forrestal: "to achieve accommodation between the power we now possess, our reluctance to use it positively, the realistic necessity for such use, and our national ideals."

In a novel that closely parallels author John Dos Passos''s own ideological struggles during the Spanish Civil War, protagonist Glenn Spotswood, an American, travels to Spain to fight on the Republican side. There, Spotswood joins the Communist Party to help establish a more just society, but his idealism quickly degrades under the stress of party orthodoxy and hypocrisy.

John Dos Passos''s literary response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt''s New Deal, The Grand Design critiques the gargantuan growth of bureaucracy in Washington during the Great Depression and World War II. The satiric novel conveys the author''s frustration with federal overreach and the hollow rhetoric that sells it to the people. "War is a time of Caesars," writes Dos Passos as he laments the death of idealistic, intelligent enterprises at the desks of elitist administrators. After witnessing the Spanish Civil War claim so many well-intentioned men, he advises caution for America''s New Dealers: "Some things we have learned, but not enough; there is more to learn. Today we must learn to found again in freedom our republic."

Before John Dos Passos enjoys fame as a chronicler and critic of American society, he wins recognition for command of aesthetics. Orient Express, a memoir of the author''s travels through Eastern Europe, the Near East, and the Middle East, focuses on sights, sounds, and smells rather than plot or character. Dos Passos applies his instincts as a painter to mountain ranges and grimy alleyways, finding beauty everywhere.His tour extends from Tiflis, Georgia, to Erivan, Armenia, and Marrakesh, Morocco; from Kasvin, Iran, to Baghdad, Iraq, and Damascus, Syria. He crosses the Syrian Desert, observes the aftermath of the Greek-Turkish War, climbs the Caucasus, explores Persia during the rise of Reza Kahn, and records the creation of Iraq by the British. His message is clear and relevant to contemporary travelers: holiness and happiness abounds in the East as much as the West."With the name of Allah for all baggage," Dos Passos writes, "you could travel from the Great Wall of China to the Niger and be fairly sure of food, and often of money, if only you were ready to touch your forehead in the dust five times a day and put away self and the glamorous West. And yet," he adds, "the West is conquering."

Tyler Spotswood, an alcoholic campaign manager, helps elect a corrupt Southern politician to the U.S. Senate. When his boss, Chuck Crawford aka "Number One," pins a scandal on Spotswood, Tyler is too drunk to blow the whistle. Number One draws many comparisons to Robert Penn Warren''s All the King''s Men. Crawford reminds many of Louisiana politician Huey Long, a figure studied in person by Dos Passos.

A record of his childhood, young adulthood, and twenties, The Best Times is a collage of cherished memories. He reflects on the joys of an itinerant life enriched by new and diverse friendships, customs, cultures, and cuisines.Luminary personalities and landscapes abound in the 1920s literary world Dos Passos loved. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Horsley Gantt-they are his beloved friends. Spain, the French Riviera, Paris, Persia, the Caucasus-they are his beloved footpaths.