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. If you enjoyed ” Manhattan Transfer”, you might like Dos Passos` ”U.S.A.”, also available in ” Penguin Modern Classics”. ”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”. (D.H. Lawrence).