Word: dos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...relate these minutiae of contemporary experience to the broad sweep of historical developments has been the task, for the past ten years, of a novelist named John Roderigo Dos Passes. Last week Author Dos Passos, 40, offered readers a novel called The Big Money* that stood midway between history and fiction, the last of a series of three books that constitute a private, unofficial history of the U. S. from...
...Method. With The Big Money John Dos Passos brought to a close one of the most ambitious projects that any U. S. novelist has undertaken. The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money run to 1,449 pages, detail the careers of some 13 major characters and a host of minor ones, picture such widely separated locales as pre-War Harvard, Wartime Paris, Miami during the Florida boom, Hollywood, Greenwich Village, Detroit. This trilogy also includes 27 brief biographies of such representative public figures as Steinmetz, Luther Burbank, Henry Ford, Sam Insull, Hearst, Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, artfully spaced throughout...
...careers converge or parallel each other. Some, like the promising but spineless Harvard intellectual, Dick Savage, have figured prominently in the previous volumes. Red-faced, hard-drinking Charley Anderson barely appeared in The 42nd Parallel; Margo Dowling, dissolute and disillusioned cinema queen, makes her debut in The Big Money. Dos Passos' method is to follow one of his characters through some meaningful experience or period in his life, then shift to another. Between chapters he inserts the short biography of some real public figure whose career forms an oblique commentary on the imaginary character just described...
...earlier 1930's, what would some Mark Sullivan of the future pick as typical novels of that bygone day? He might well choose such a lean and lustful tale as John O'Hara's Butterfield 8. He might mention in passing such names as John Dos Passes, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner. But these would all be sideshows. Most phenomenally popular book of the quinquennium, he would report, was Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse. By 1935 critics who had tried to blink it off as simply a big flash in a shallow pan were opening their eyes...
...Marching! obeys the law of Marxian fiction in having no hero but half-a-dozen protagonists, each symbolizing some aspect of the proletarian struggle. In spite of her ancestry and her creed, Clara Weatherwax writes first-rate, first-hand U.S. prose that will remind more than one reader of Dos Passes. Her propaganda will propagate few proselytes, but her winged words should strike home to even a carapacic conservative...