1919: Volume Two of the U.S.A. Trilogy (U.S.A. Trilogy, 2)

by John Dos Passos

Book Overview

With 1919, the second volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos continues his "vigorous and sweeping panorama of twentieth-century America" (Forum), lauded on publication of the first volume not... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618056823
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 1.0" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Leaves me wanting more

The bottom line is this: if you liked The 42nd Parallel: Volume One of the U.S.A. Trilogy, you will like _1919_. I liked both books. They are structurally similar, with Dos Passos weaving a tapestry of American life in the early part of the last century, with news and biography and longer stories of individual characters representing many parts of the socio-political milieu in the covered period. The longer stories weave in and out of each other with multiple points of intersection. While this is interesting, it is sometimes hard to keep the momentum going as a reader. At the section ends, this is an easy book to put down. This is partly because there is no larger narrative created except for the grand sweep of history. Some of the characters are more sympathetic than others but you get the feeling Dos Passos wasn't trying for a nice story; he blends naturalism with modernism and leaves me wanting more.

Highly Engaging and Entertaining Art

This second book in the U.S.A. trilogy seems more accomplished than the first. While I tend to believe this is because Dos Passos had gotten into the rhythm of the novel, it could be that, by the second book, the reader has become more acquainted with the experimental aspects. At any rate, this book, no less than the first, left me in awe. Dos Passos is a writer of the highest order. While the first book focused more on economic issues in the lives of everyday Americans, this novel shifts focus to the war. Few of the primary characters are enthusiastic about the war and, thus, the cross-section of America presented cannot be said to be ideologically representative anymore than the first was ethnically or culturally representative. And yet the scope of the novel is broad. Again, Dos Passos' subject is America rather than individual Americans. While the individuals are interesting, they are not essential as individuals. Dos Passos' ability to set a scene is as good as anyone's. In the following, two characters from the first novel are sitting at a small café in Europe just after Eveline has asked an intimate question of J.W. "Eveline sat looking at him [J.W.] with her lips a little apart, her cheeks blazing. `Maybe it's taken the war to teach us how to live,' he said. `We've been too much interested in money and material things, it's taken the French to show us how to live. Where back home in the States could you find a beautiful atmosphere like this?' J.W. waved his arm to include in a sweeping gesture the sea, the tables crowded with women dressed in bright colors and men in their best uniforms, the bright glint of blue light on glasses and cutlery. The waiter mistook his gesture and slyly substituted a full bottle for the empty bottle in the champagnepail." This is as close as most of the characters get to introspection. The characters of this novel, as most Americans yesterday and today, live their lives rather than ruminate about them. Where J.W. perhaps regret his focus on work and material things over relationships, other characters' lives are ordered primarily around relationships or the moment rather than about succeeding in any traditional sense. One character sums up his view after breaking up with a girl he had impregnated: "Gee, I'm glad I'm not a girl, he kept thinking. He had a splitting headache. He locked his door, got undressed and put out the light. When he opened the window a gust of raw rainy air came into the room and made him feel better. It was just like Ed said, you couldn't do anything without making other people miserable. A hell of a rotten world." It may be a hell of a rotten world, but in Dos Passos' hands, it is a beautiful one all the same. Dos Passos' vision can seem barren of the hope and optimism usually associated with the "American dream." Dos Passos is not interested in the popular illusion, however, but in America as it was lived by ordinary people. This trilogy may be the true he

The one thing that enslaves people more than any other to the servitude of war is nationalism

Those words, written by John Dos Passos while serving as a Red Cross Ambulance Driver during the First World War, provide the underlying theme for "1919", Volume II of Dos Passos' "USA Trilogy". Dos Passos is one of the (now) lesser known literary giants of the first half of the 20th-century. At the height of his fame in the 1930s he found himself on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. By the time Volume III (The Big Money) was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". 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." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell, made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend (anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles) apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Dos Passos reports that he told Hemingway that "the question I keep putting to myself is what's the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?" Hemingway replied "civil liberties, [__ _ _ ]. Are you with us or against us?" It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy. 1919 takes up where "42nd Parallel" left off. President Wilson, despite his 1916 campaign slogan "He kept us out of War" had taken the United States to war against Germany in 1917. Many of the characters found in 42nd Parallel, including Eleanor Stoddard, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eveline Hutchins, and Joe Williams find their to France. Along with a few new characters, their lives intersect and divert throughout the war and the subsequent peace talks at Versailles. With the exception of J. War Moorehouse these are all relatively `little people' who have no real influence on the course of events but who simply must endure them. In addition to the stories of these fictional characters, 1919 is interspersed with mini-biographies of real people, newsreel clippings that place the story in a social a political context, and a series of autobiographical sketches in which Dos Passos steps out from the story and provides his own personal context to the times. The writing is terse and enjoyable. The highlights of the book for me were his biographical sketches. His mini-biography of Woodrow Wilson ("Meester Vil

Great book - problematic edition

This is a great book - arguably the best of the trilogy, although it should be said that none of these books really stands on its own; U.S.A. is a single book in three volumes. Compared to other versions of Dos Passos, Mariner's quality paperback editions leave a great deal to be desired. Even the Signet mass markets featured the original Reginald Marsh illustrations, which add a great deal of texture to the experience of reading the novel. I don't know why they weren't included here. Their absence almost feels pretentious, part of a general move toward the more respectable, 'literary' QP format, after Signet's humbler, plebian MMs. Moreover, Mariner's 1919 is littered with printing errors, sometimes two or three in a paragraph. Given the fragmented nature of [much of] Dos Passos's text to begin with, Mariner's contribution of spelling mistakes and other typos can make a conscientious reader feel paranoid. Read the book, but seek out another edition.

Breathless, fascinating ride loses steam towards the end

1919 follows several more or less powerless Americans up to and through America's involvement in the war and beyond, as fate and their immediate desires push them around the globe. The novel may have a reputation for being experimental, but this arises more from its structure than its readability: long stretches of conventional narrative in a breezy, modern voice are broken up by biographies of significant figures (Roosevelt, Wilson and heroes of the US labor movement), by "Newsreel" collages of press reports, and (least successfully) by "The Camera Eye" -- an ongoing interior monologue of an unnamed extra character, separate from the main stories, also caught up in the horror of the war. Dos Passos's writing is fluid, transparent, and saturated with detail; the detail is reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis, but the novel moves at ten times the pace, overwhelming itself with the desire to show you new things. In some ways it reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" more than any contemporary novel in its ambition to say something about almost everything, to squeeze as much as possible in. The description of Cambridge, MA was so pitch-perfect that I believe utterly in his descriptions of everywhere else, Genoa and Paris and Liverpool and Buenos Aires. The places are great; the incidents are great; what lets the novel down is the people. Almost all of the characters are well-intentioned but not self-aware, driven by impulse, smart and observant but passive and impotent. They seem to deliberately seek out experiences to distract themselves from serious thought about what's going on; even those who do engage end up unable to make a difference (like the Socialist agitator towards the end of the book, going to jail on his twenty-third birthday). Although the biographies engage emotionally with their subjects, you find yourself wishing for the bluff, genial detachment of the main narrative to break into real anger or real passion; the war and the great events surrounding it seem no more or less consequential than a decision to take a train ride or an unsatisfactory one-night stand in a port town. Other reviewers read this as bitterness, a condemnation of the war for being yet another distraction dreamed up by the ruling classes. To me it reads more like an expression of powerlessness, a huge shrug of the shoulders, a feeling that no-one can do any more in the face of history. Nevertheless, this is a great achievement; a documentary-like attempt to show the world as it is, with no romance or sentimentality clouding the view. If possible, try to get a copy with the original illustrations, which add a huge amount of flavor.