John Dos Passos
U.S.A.

The 42nd Parallel • 1919 • The Big Money

The U.S.A. trilogy "hasn't been available in a single volume for decades. All hail, then, the estimable Library of America, which has brought out such an edition.... Replete with notes and chronologies of both Dos Passos's life and of world events contemporaneous with the action of the novels, its edition of U.S.A. is one to savor."—The Plain Dealer

This volume contains the trilogy U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, consisting of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). These works were first collected in one volume in 1938.

In an introduction to the 1937 Modern Library edition of The 42nd Parallel, Dos Passos described the trilogy as "a long narrative which deals with the more or less entangled lives of a number of Americans during the first three decades of the present century . . . In an effort to take in as much as possible of the broad field of the lives of these times, three separate sequences have been threaded in and out among the stories. Of these The Camera Eye aims to indicate the position of the observer and Newsreel to give an inkling of the common mind of the epoch. Portraits of a number of real people are interlarded in the pauses in the narrative because their lives seem to embody so well the quality of the soil in which Americans of these generations grew."

During the winter of 1926-27 Dos Passos began to make notes on what would eventually become U.S.A., envisioning the work as a single long novel; by 1928 he was working steadily on The 42nd Parallel, which was completed at the end of the following year. By then he had decided to expand his projected work into a trilogy, although it was only after the publication of all three novels that he chose the title U.S.A.

The 42nd Parallel was first published by Harper and Brothers in February 1930. Dos Passos completed the manuscript of 1919 in the summer of 1931, but Harpers rejected the book when Dos Passos refused to cut the satirical portrait of J.P. Morgan, who had recently given the publisher financial assistance. Dos Passos' literary agent, A.C. Brandt, was able to transfer the book quickly to the firm of Harcourt, Brace, who published it in March 1932. Progress on The Big Money was delayed when Dos Passos suffered recurrent bouts of illness during 1933 and 1934. He completed the novel in March 1936 and it was published by Harcourt, Brace in August of that year.

In the summer of 1937 Dos Passos worked out an agreement with Harcourt, Brace to publish a one-volume edition of the trilogy, and it was for this publication that he chose the title U.S.A., and also undertook considerable revisions in The 42nd Parallel. He added a prologue entitled "U.S.A." which--in conjunction with "Vag," the last sequence of The Big Money--provides a unifying framing device for the trilogy. He also made cuts in many of the "Newsreels" and transposed some sections; in addition, the typographical layout of The 42nd Parallel was brought into conformity with the other two books (some of these changes are indicated in the notes to this volume).

The revised version of The 42nd Parallel was first published in a separate volume by The Modern Library in November 1937. The same plates were used for the one-volume U.S.A. which Harcourt, Brace published in January 1938; the texts for 1919 and The Big Money were those of the 1932 and 1936 first editions. Dos Passos made no further revisions in U.S.A. The texts printed here are those of the revised version of The 42nd Parallel (New York: The Modern Library, 1937) and the first book editions of 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932) and The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).

This volume presents the texts of the original printings chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce their typographic design (except for those features of textual layout that Dos Passos considered integral to the novel). The texts are printed without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular.

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