Word: dos
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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...
...Croix de guerre in the War. He has genuine mechanical ability, works as a mechanic for a time, gets along well with plain men when he sees them as individuals. But pursuit of the Big Money corrupts his native talents as well as his good nature, eventually kills him. Dos Passos frames the story of Anderson with thumbnail sketches of Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of scientific management; and Thorstein Veblen. Like Ford, Charley Anderson had native mechanical skill, loved to tinker with machines. Like Taylor, he suffered because he tried to speed up production, to make manufacture efficient...
...Thus Dos Passos intimates that the stories of his characters are not exceptional or unique, that the waste, confusion, purposelessness in their lives, as well as their good human qualities and inborn talents also appear in the lives of famed figures in public history...