Andrew Carnegie started out buying Adams Express and Pullman stock when they were in a slump;he had confidence in railroads,he had confidence in communications,he had confidence in transportation,he believed in iron.Andrew Carnegie believed in iron, built bridges Bessemer plants blast furnaces rolling mills;Andrew Carnegie believed in oil;Andrew Carnegie believed in steel;always saved his moneywhenever he had a million dollars he invested it.Andrew Carnegie became the richest man in the worldand died. Andrew CarnegieJohn Dos Passos had problems with his father. His father also had issues with him given that he had the audacity to swell the belly of his mistress. The elder Dos Passos was a distinguished lawyer friendly with the industrial capitalists. He made out their trusts, advised them, and made a heap of cabbage doing so. When his wife died he did marry John’s mother, but did not acknowledge John until he was 16. Needless to say this put a burr under the young Dos Passos’s saddle. The 42nd Parallel is the first of three novels that make up the U.S.A. Trilogy. Dos Passos used his first few novels to rail against capitalism and showed sympathy for communism which did not have the stigma associated with it that came into play in the 1940s. I’m sure people would classify this as an anti-capitalist novel, but to me I thought it was balanced in showing what good people can do in a capitalist system and also showing why communism was of such interest to American workers. This novel had twelve characters that each get a chance to tell their story. I’m going to cheat and copy the explanation of the devices utilized by Dos Passos to construct this novel from Wikipedia. The four narrative modesIn the fictional narrative sections, the U.S.A. trilogy relates the lives of twelve characters as they struggle to find a place in American society during the early part of the twentieth century. Each character is presented to the reader from their childhood on and in free indirect speech. While their lives are separate, characters occasionally meet. Some minor characters whose point of view is never given crop up in the background, forming a kind of bridge between the characters."The Camera Eye" sections are written in 'stream of consciousness' and are an autobiographical Künstlerroman of Dos Passos, tracing the author's development from a child to a politically committed writer. Camera Eye 50 arguably contains the most famous line of the trilogy, when Dos Passos states upon the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti: "all right we are two nations."The "Newsreels" consist of front page headlines and article fragments from the Chicago Tribune for The 42nd Parallel, the New York World for Nineteen Nineteen and The Big Money, as well as lyrics from popular songs. Newsreel 66, preceding Camera Eye 50, announcing the Sacco and Vanzetti verdict, contains the lyrics of "The Internationale."The biographies are accounts of historical figures. The most often anthologized of these biographies is "The Body of an American", which tells the story of an unknown soldier who was killed in World War I which concludes Nineteen Nineteen.The blending of these modes is where Dos Passos brilliance really shines. I did not feel irritated at the switches between narratives, but read each new section with equal fascination. It was really a precursor to TV with, in this case, informative commercial breaks between sections of storyline. ”SIX UNCLAD BATHING GIRLS BLACK EYES OF HORRID MAN.”This book is really about twelve people trying to make it in America. Some of them are capitalist and some are self proclaimed communists, but at the end of the day all the characters are concerned primarily about keeping a roof over their head and food in their mouth. To me a blending of communist and capitalist ideas comes as close to a perfect society as we can get. When I first discovered in Star Trek, as a young pup, that they didn’t use money anymore it was an intriguing concept to think about; an evolutionary thought. Contrary to what I had been taught, in an anti-communist environment, the will of the individual would be tempered under such a concept, and yet; on Star Trek these people I admired were individualistic and motivated to be successful. I also liked a world that would allow me to succeed even though I didn’t have any money because...well...I didn’t have any. ”GIRL STEPS ON MATCH; DRESS IGNITED; DIES.””Thomas Edison only went to school for three months because the teacher thought he wasn’t RIGHT bright. His mother taught him what she knew at home and read eighteenth century writers with him, Gibbon and Hume and Newton, and let him rig up a laboratory in the cellar.Whenever he read about anything he went down in the cellar and tried it out.” Thomas EdisonDuring the time period of this novel the labor unions were gaining strength helped of course by the horrible working conditions and low pay that the industrial tycoons of the day imposed upon the people. The concept of a happy worker is a productive worker was not even a sparkle in the eye of Carnegie or Rockefeller. They were more concerned about who could pile up the most money and labor, though necessary for them to become rich, was only notated on the deficit side of the ledger. There is such an anti-union sentiment in the country today, forgetting what wonderful advancements unions gave us, and also completely ignoring that the tycoons of today are the same as the tycoons of the 19th century. If unions are destroyed and laws are struck from the books intended to modify what seems to be the natural tendency of corporations (we learned they are people TOO) to exploit workers for the unmitigated ability to shower more money on the top 1%, the middle class as we know it is frankly doomed. For the sake of huge profits NOW corporations forget that people have to have money to buy the products they are producing. Paying people a wage that insures that they have money beyond just what they need to pay rent, food, and utilities means they can buy clothes they don’t necessarily need, impulsively buy Twenty Shades of Grey at the checkout stand, go to the movies, and buy that latest thingamagig. The money goes down and then it comes back up. Everybody needs skin in the game. If workers are merely subsisting it doesn’t take long for them to become disgruntled workers. Viva la Revolucion! ”COLLEGE HEAD DENIES KISSES.””The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.”I remember when I felt that way. I was naive enough to feel that I could do everything. I didn’t have to choose. The world was my oyster to paraphrase some hack writer from England. To be successful of course, something I was also eventually concerned about which also jettisoned me out of the halycyon days of the book business, it did become necessary to choose, make concessions, and pick of path that would allow me to achieve some semblance of security. I got married and had kids and suddenly any reckless thought was carefully weighed and generally rejected in favor of the decision with less risk. The Wobblies are coming!One of the characters Mac finds himself caught on the treadmill trying to make more and more money to please his wife and kids. He enjoys his life despite the stress. His wife is pretty and the way she smells and feels when she is in his arms provides a comfort. His kids put a smile on his face. Money drives a wedge in his marriage and after one particularly bad fight he chooses to chuck it all and heed the call of the communist movement. He finds the cause exhilarating for a while, but ultimately discovers that trading his family for a larger cause is not as fulfilling as he hoped. Dos Passos does play with the concept of “free love”, relationships between women, and the consuming passions of lust. ”After he’d given her a last rough kiss, feeling her tongue in his mouth and his nostrils full of her hair and the taste of her mouth in his mouth he’d walk home with his ears ringing, feeling sick and weak; when he got to bed he couldn’t sleep but would toss around all night thinking he was going MAD.””JURORS AT GATES OF BEEF BARONS.”Watching these characters succeed and fail was actually inspiring to me. They are all hard working people trying to find their place in this world. The stream of conscious writing is not difficult to follow. The influence Dos Passos must have had on a whole host of writers before he was duck walked off stage in the growing anti-communist sentiment of the 1940s and 1950s, would make an interesting PHD paper for some earnest young person. I will continue with the rest of the trilogy in the early months of 2013 with great anticipation. John Dos Passos”While there is a lower class I am of it, while there is a criminal class I am of it, while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Gene Debs
http://kristinsbookblog.blogspot.com/...First, as an introduction to Dos Passos, who – if you are anything like I was until recently (and only because of my book list obsession) – you have never heard of, some quotes:“[He’s:] the greatest living writer of our time.” -Jean Paul Sartre, 1938“Dos Passos came nearer than any of us to writing the Great American Novel, and it’s entirely possible he succeeded. I can only say, from my own point of view, that no novel I read while in college stimulated me more, astounded me more and showed me what a thrilling inner life was there for anyone gifted enough to be a major American novelist.” – Norman Mailer on Dos Passos’s U.S.A. TrilogyDos Passos created a “whole new school of writing.” - Sinclair Lewis, on Dos Passos’s Manhattan TransferOne of the greatest pleasures of being a reader is not only discovering a hidden gem in a book, but finding a hidden gem in a new author…especially one that made you leery at first. I was not overly excited about John Dos Passos or his U.S.A. Trilogy. Even though basic research would/should have made me anticipate it with joy. A forgotten member of the Lost Generation? Contemporary and friend (sort of ) of Fitzgerald and Hemingway? This should have tipped me off. but instead, I was apprehensive about my ability to like Dos Passos. Somewhere along the line, he had become lumped in with Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. Not that I don’t sometimes enjoy Lewis and Dreiser (Main Street was one of my favorite books I read this year). They can just be a little daunting sometimes.And then, lo and behold, I very quickly learned that I was oh so wrong in my apprehension. 42nd Parallel, the first volume of the trilogy, turned out to be FABULOUS!42nd Parallel, published in 1930, tells the story of five characters: Mac, Janey, Eleanor, Ward, and Charley, following them from all childhood until the beginning of America’s direct involvement in WWI. They’re all from different backgrounds, different places. Eventually they converge and begin to play parts in each others lives. They’re all trying to figure out where they fit in – where they fit in society, in the country, the new century, the political world - what their role could or should be. But it’s not a character study – Dos Passos isn’t trying to be Henry James and describe every minute detail…every motivation. It just goes – it moves…somewhere I saw Dos Passos’s writing described as “rapid-transit pace,” and that is an apt description.Dos Passos calls his style "contemporary chronicle." The novel isn’t just these characters, and it’s not traditional narrative. The story of each is told intermittently from that characters point-of-view (but in the third person). This is interspersed with news headlines, song lyrics, biographies of famous or important people of the time, and what Dos Passos calls the “camera eye,” which I will post about later. And when I say biographies, I don’t mean, “so-and-so was born at this place, on this date, and here’s what he did.” Here’s two examples:(From "The Electrical Wizard")Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in eighteen fortyseven;Milan was a little town on the Huron River that for a while was the wheatshipping port for the whole Western Reserve; the railroads took away the carrying trade, the Edison family went up to Port Huron in Michigan to grow up with the country;his father was a shinglemaker who puttered round with various small speculations; he dealt in grain and feed and lumber and built a wooden tower a hundred feet high; tourists and excursionists paid a quarter each to go up the tower and look at the view over Lake Huron and the St. Clair River and Sam Edison became a solid and respected citizen of Port Huron. Thomas Edison only went to school for three months because the teacher thought he wasn't right bright. His mother taught him what she knew at home and read eighteenth century writers with him, Gibbon and Hume and Newton, and let him rig up a laboratory in the cellar. Whenever he read about anything he went down cellar and tried it out.When he was twelve he needed money to buy books and chemicals; he got a concession as a newsbutcher on the daily train from Detroit to Port Huron. In Detroit there as a public library and he read it...He worked all day and all night tinkering with cogwheels and bits of copperwire and chemicals in bottles, whenever he thought of a device he tried it out. He made things work. He wasn't a mathematician. I can hire mathematicians but mathematicians can't hire me, he said.In eighteen seventysix he moved to Menlo Park where he invented the carbon transmitter and made the telephone a commercial proposition, that made the microphone possiblehe worked all day and all night and producedthe phonographthe incandescent electric lamp and systems of generation, distribution, regulation and measurement of electric current, sockets, switches, insulators, manholes. Edison worked out the first systems of electric light using a direct current and small unit lamps and the multiple arc that were installed in London Paris New York and Sunbury Pa., [YEAH SUNBURY!:]the threewire systemthe magnetic ore separator,an electric railway. (I just had to make sure I included the part about Sunbury! It's friggin' awesome when you come from a small town without any nationally known import and then you come across it in a book of such importance.) and from "Proteus"In eighteen ninetytwo when Eichemeyer sold out the corporation that was to form General Electric, Steinmetz was entered in the contract along with other valuable apparatus. All his life Steinmetz was a piece of apparatus belonging to General Electric...General Electric humored him, let him be a socialist, let him keep a greenhouseul of cactuses lit up by mercury lights, let him have alligators, talking crows and a gila monster for pets and the publicity department talked up the wizard, the medicine man who knew the symbols that opened all the doors of Ali Baba's cave...Steinmetz was a famous magician and he talked to Edison tapping with the Morse code on Edison's kneebecause Edison was so very deafand he went out Westto make speeches that nobody understoodand he talked to Bryan about God on a railroad trainand all the reporters stood round while he and Einsteinmet face to face;and but they couldn't catch what they said.And Steinmetz was the most valuable piece of apparatus General Electric hadUntil he wore out and died. His narrative has a similar pace and rhythm as the biographies. 42nd Parallel is experimental and modern. You can see the coming generation of writers, and I was struck by the similartiy of cadence in Dos Passos as in Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. I don't know if Ginsberg read or was influenced by Dos Passos, but I can't imagine he wasn't. I know Kerouac was. He quotes U.S.A. Trilogy in his letters, and was reading Dos Passos (aloong with Dreiser, Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis) during the time he was outlining Dr. Sax. What I don’t understand is why, apart from my book lists, have I not heard of Dos Passos? Why isn’t he mentioned in school, in literary resources, along with Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Hemingway? Where did his reputation sour such that, while he was just as popular and important in the early 20th century as those others were, somehow he is now pretty much forgotten?On average, I finish almost one book per week. Over the last 10 years, that means almost 500 books. Probably more than half of those are just ok. So far this year, I’ve read 53 books and looking at my list, less than 15 really stand out. So, to find a new author that really excites me…that’s what reading is all about. Jeanette Winterson, in one of her essays, says, “knowing that there are favorite books still to come is a continuing happiness.” That’s why I bother with book lists…for an increased chance to find those great authors. The chance that I would have picked up Dos Passos without his appearance on The Lists is probably relatively small. But I loved 42nd Parallel…I’m so glad I found it. I cannot wait to read the next two books in the trilogy, and his other work. A+ for this leading contender for the Great American Novel.
What do You think about The 42nd Parallel (2000)?
Dos Pasos, John. THE 42ND PARALLEL. (1930). ****.tI first read this novel, the first of the author’s trilogy, U.S.A., about forty-five years ago, when I was in grad school. I remember that it really knocked me for a loop back then since it was full of new ways of providing the reader with information about time and place of the characters. Dos Pasos used techniques that I hadn’t seen before: Newsreel excerpts in bold print and asides he called “The Camera’s Eye.” The novel itself tells the story of several men and women trying to make their way in America in the period just prior to WW I. Times were tough and opportunities few. The stories are episodic, and the individuals followed are picked up here and there as the line progresses. To tell about each person followed wouldn’t help any with the plot line. You just have to know that each of the characters has his or her own problems in finding work and finding love. The characters are independent, there doesn’t seem to be any relationship among them. They are simply characters in a character study of America during the period. Dos Pasos manages to bring America of the period to life through his cast of characters, and, presumably, continues to do so in the succeeding two novels. Although the impact of the novel has mellowed somewhat over the years, it is still a landmark effort in American literature. Recommended.
—Tony
A vivid, detailed slice of Americana set right before the dawn of World War I. The 42nd Parellel traces the growth and development of four different characters, their goals continuously shifting based on circumstances both personal and economic.Some swallow their misgivings and become locked into jobs and marriages that they only partially care for, some pursue entrepreneurial dreams that are bleak at times and invigorating at others, and some characters just become aimlessly lost in every sense of the word.Ultimately, what's truly rich about this book is that Dos Passos has such an earnest, sincere approach towards depicting the human condition that it is hard for the reader to make passing judgments on characters that they might honestly not care to know anything about in real life.That and he writes beautifully.
—Jackesk
I always appreciate an artist who bucks a trend, especially when they do so with full awareness. Dos Passos uses diverse tools (stream of consciousness, poetic collages, realist narrative) but dedicates himself to an explicitly structured approach that is uniquely his own. I've seen it aped in Stand on Zanzibar, but that was a pale reflection or something that here, even when it doesn't completely work, is a brave and incongruous set of experiments. It is particularly interesting to view this in contrast to modernists who deliberately obfuscate or sabotage their structures. If this makes the book sound like a dry or academic exercise, that's not inappropriate. The narrative can drag at times, even when the subject matter is revolution and war. The stream of consciousness "Camera Eye" segments are hit and miss. I found the poetic biographies to be the most engaging and successful of Dos Passos' voices. These I would recommend unreservedly, and if you're going to read them you should probably check out the rest of the book.The message of this book has changed over time. Dos Passos wrote as a passionate young man on volatile complex subjects, and I respect his willingness to take a stand and testify to his belief in workers rights, socialism, the abjuration of organized religion, and so forth. More than that, he does a remarkable job of presenting the full backdrop of the times as context for the formulation of this belief, including its antithesis. He is not afraid to recognize legitimate counter-arguments to his own thesis, with the result that this is the most fully realized picture of pre-WWI America that I've come across. Where his original message has been tempered and in some ways refuted by history, the value of this book as a historical record has only grown as the old America disappears in our brave new post cold war world.
—Mike Moore
