U.S.A. (Penguin Modern Classics)

Read this to find out how modern America became modern America. Time and space given to forgotten voices. Immaculately researched. Don't be put off by the book's length. We owe it to ourselves, as inhabitants of the Western world to read this. I can say no more.

Dos Passos (with these novels in particular) sometimes has a reputation for being difficult. It's certainly true that his style of jumbling long stretches of character biography alongside shorter pieces and sections of news headlines, song-lyrics, etcetera, can be disorienting at first, but once you get used to the scrapbook effect it produces, it makes a lot of sense.Most of the book is taken up with the narratives of individual characters' lives. It's hard to describe a plot, as the book follows one character for maybe a few dozen pages, maybe hundreds, before switching to another character, perhaps to return later on (some characters recur, some appear once and then disappear again). What links all of the characters is that they are Americans living their lives in the early 20th Century. beyond that there's a huge variety: some are tremendously successful, some lead hard, directionless, arguably meaningless lives. What Dos Passos does is to accord all of them the respect of his narrative. He follows bums and itinerant workers with the same eye he follows businessmen and artists. The end result is a kaleidoscopic vision of early 20th Century America.If you're a bit worried about the commitment (this is a long, long book), I'd encourage you to try reading the novels separately and see how you go. They were originally published as three medium-length stand alone novels, and taking a breather between installments certainly helped me get through. In the end, it's well worth it to experience an incredible period through Dos Passos's impressionistic, shifting, but always lucid stories.

How often can you say of a nearly 1200-page book that you have read it several times, and would do so (and will do so) again? This is one of the truly great American novels, brilliantly written and so involving that you feel by the end that you have lived this story rather than just read it. The characters are beautifully drawn, the story telling is strong and assured, wonderfully memorable, sympathetic, and with the interspersed Camera Eye and Newsreel vignettes, Dos Passos creates a rich backdrop that puts each scene and setting into a larger whole and brings the bustling complicated world of early 20th century America vividly to life. Highly recommended.

'Very much a young man's book: clips of radio and newspapers help to create the atmosphere and drive the book along. Hugely underrated, probably because of its Leftism, it creates and image of a USA more like Paris in 1968 that of Family Guy of Homer Simpson. Well worth reading and the interesting clips make you dip in and out of it, again and again.

one of the great novels of the 20th century by a writer often overlooked in the American canon.

One of the best pieces of literature ever written! Cinematic, political, poetic, and oh so human. More people should read this!

Sorry no comeback on this as it was a gift.

highly recommended for those disturbed by usa today