E Pluribus Unum

On John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.

John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. — comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) — stands today like an unvisited historical monument in the annals of American literature, a Grant’s Tomb of the bookshelf. Despite its acceptance as a classic, and its being ranked twenty-third on the Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth…