1919
1919,novel by Dos Passos published in 1932. It is the second in the trilogy U.S.A. (collected 1938), including The 42nd Parallel (1930) and The Big Money (1936). Interspersed in the narrative are brief biographies of John Reed, Randolph Bourne, Theodore Roosevelt, Paxton Hibben, Wilson J.P. Morgan, Joe Hill, Wesley Everest, and the Unknown Soldier. (For critical discussion, see Dos Passos.)
Joe Williams deserts from the navy, gets a forged seaman's certificate, and sails on tankers and freighters across the Atlantic, continuing his wanderings until the Armistice, although several times jailed and aboard torpedoed ships. Richard Ellsworth Savage, son of a genteelly poor New Jersey family, is aided by a politician, who sends him to Harvard. There he is an aesthete until, stirred by the war, he joins an ambulance corps in France and then, through the politician's influence, gets a commission in the U.S. Army. His eye ever on the main...
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