' My literary hero is John Dos Passos'
- Adam Curtis (filmmaker) 'A modernist masterpiece capturing the fragmented lives it sketches in a dazzling kaleidoscope of New York City in the 1920s' Christopher Hudson Evening Standard' Dos Passos has invented only one thing an art of story-telling But that is enough to create a universe' Jean-Paul Sartre' The best modern book about New York'DH Lawrence A modernist masterwork that has more in common with films than traditional novels John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer
Includes:: an introduction by Jay Mc Inerney in Penguin Modern Classics A colourful multi-faceted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s Manhattan Transfer ranks with James Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful & often lyrical meditation on the modern city Using experimental montage techniques borrowed from the cinema vivid descriptions & bursts of overheard conversation & the jumbled case histories of a picaresque cast of characters from dockside crapshooters to high-society flappers Dos Passos constructs a brilliant impressionistic portrait of New York City as a great futuristic machine filled with motion drama & human tragedy John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was born in Chicago the son of an eminent lawyer After graduating from Harvard he served in the US Army Medical Corps during the First World War & dabbled in journalism before embarking on life as a writer In 1925 he published Manhattan Transfer his first experimental novel in what was to become his peculiar style
- a mixture of fact & fiction His began a series of panoramic epics of American life with the USA trilogy using the same technique & tracing through interwoven biographies the story of America from the early twentieth century to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929