U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [0]
A. The 42nd parallel
B. Nineteen Nineteen
C. The Big Money
BY JOHN DOS PASSOS
THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
-i-COPYRIGHT, 1930, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937,
BY JOHN DOS PASSOS
THE MODERN LIBRARY
IS PUBLISHED BY
RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
BENNETT A. CERF · DONALD S. KLOPFER · ROBERT K. HAAS
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed by Parkway Printing Company Paper by Richard Bauer & Co. Bound by H. Wolff
-ii-JOHN DOS PASSOS
(1896-)
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR OF
"U.S.A."
By far the most ambitious undertaking of John Dos Passos'
career as a writer is the trilogy, U.S.A. The three novels, The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen and The Big Money, are brought together in one volume, thus fulfil ing the author's original intention of making these three panels an integrated lit-erary pattern of contemporary American life. Born in Chicago, John Dos Passos received his early education there and was graduated from Harvard University cum laude in 1916. Immediately afterward he served with the Harjes, the Red Cross and the U.S.A. Ambulance Services during the World War. His novel, Three Soldiers, issued in 1921
(Modern Li-brary No. 205), remains today one of the few war books to survive as living literature. Since its appearance, each new work of fiction has advanced John Dos Passos' development, and today he is acknowledgedly one of the world's foremost novelists. As a participant in the American social struggle, notably as a cham-pion of Sacco and Vanzetti, Dos Passos' record is quite as distin-guished as is his achievement in the role of social commentator and novelist.
-iii-U. S. A.
The young man walks fast by himself through the
crowd that thins into the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench; blood tingles with wants; mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing and stinging; muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmender's pick and shovel work, the fisherman's knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of the bridgeman's arm as he slings down the
whitehot rivet, the engineer's slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirtfarmer's use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the fur-row. The young man walks by himself searching through the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone.
The streets are empty. People have packed into
subways, climbed into streetcars and buses i in the sta-tions they've scampered for suburban trains; they've filtered into lodgings and tenements, gone up in eleva-tors into apartmenthouses. In a showwindow two sal-low windowdressers in their shirtsleeves are bringing out a dummy girl in a red evening dress, at a corner welders in masks lean into sheets of blue flame repair-ing a cartrack, a few drunk bums shamble along, a sad streetwalker fidgets under an arclight. From the river comes the deep rumbling whistle of a steamboat leav-ing dock. A tug hoots far away. 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
-v-fainter in al eys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of al the steamboats, register at al the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in al the boardinghouses, sleep in al 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.
No job, no woman, no house, no city.
Only the ears busy to catch the speech are not
alone; the ears are caught tight, linked tight by the tendrils of phrased words, the turn of a joke, the sing-song fade of a story, the gruff fal of a sentence; link-ing tendrils of speech twine through the city blocks, spread over pavements, grow out along broad parked avenues, speed with the trucks leaving on