Growth of a Nation

THE 42x0 PARALLEL--John Dos Passes --Harper ($2.50).

The Great American Novel has never been written, perhaps never will be. But Author Dos Passos has made a bold bid for it. Certainly no U. S. novel has ever been more comprehensive than The 42nd Parallel, none has ever given a broader, more sweeping view of the whole country. At the opposite pole from Author Thornton Niven Wilder (TIME, Feb. 24) who writes neat, classical tales of other lands. Author Dos Passos unwinds a rapid, impressionistic, five-reel cinema of his own U. S., from 1900 to the War. Of more ambitious scope tha Cineman David Wark Griffith's The Birth of a Nation but of the same breadth of conception. Author Dos Passos' book sets a new mark for U. S. novelists to shoot at.

The Plan is ingenious, effective. Three parallel streams of action run through the book, appear in turn, like plaits in a braid:1) Newsreel, 2) The Camera's Eye, 3) the story of one of the five main characters. The Newsreel is a cleverly mixed medley of headlines, scraps of news stories, popular songs. Like clocks striking the hour, each newsreel sets the time; also serves as caption. The Camera's Eye, brief scraps of autobiographical reminiscence, picks out quick scenes, quickly vanished, from these 17 years. The main story tells the lives of five people whose lives gradually converge: Mac, wobbly (I. W. W.) linotyper; Janey, Washington stenographer; J. Ward Moorehouse, "public relations counsel"; Eleanor Stoddard, Chicago pseudartist; Charley Anderson, mechanic from Fargo, N. Dak. And here and there, in a kind of chorus to the whole action, are prose-poem biographies of big men of the day--written half like news paper obituaries, half like Whitman poems: Eugene Victor Debs, "Big Bill'' Haywood, Luther Burbank, William Jennings Bryan, Minor Cooper Keith (founder of the United Fruit Co.), Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Alva Edison, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, "the most valuable piece of apparatus General Electric had"; Robert Marion La Follette.

The effect of the story is gigantically satiric. But Author Dos Passes has let his book speak for itself: it is not in the material but in his arrangement of it that the artist shows his hand. Author Dos Passes thinks of himself as an historian, tries to give an exact picture of an epoch.

The Author. John (Roderigo) Dos Passos was born in Chicago (1896), has lived in Manhattan, Cambridge (Mass.). London, Brussels, Madrid, Paris. He graduated from Harvard cum laude in 1916. By conservatives considered a radi cal (all his writings have "social-revolutionary" leanings), he is looked at some what askance by orthodox Reds because his books are not primarily propaganda. Though many of his friends are Communists he is not a member of any party. Unlike such writers as Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos is more of an artist than an agitator. He was one of the artists, writers arrested in Boston in 1927 for protesting publicly against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.* Dos Passos has many friends, no intimates. He is the original of "Hugo Bamman" in Critic Edmund Wilson's novel, I Thought of Daisy (TIME, Oct. 7). Tall, anxious-browed, bald, nearsighted, monkey-gestured, he is excessively shy, extremely polite, chivalrous, stammers, cannot pronounce the letter R. Said never to use bad language himself (except when speaking of the late great Author Henry James), he admires those who do, writes about them. Unlike his books, he is brimming with youthful enthusiasm. Last September he married Miss Kate Smith of Chicago: they are now abroad. Other books: One Man's Initiation, Three Soldiers, Orient Express, Manhattan Transfer, Rosinante to the Road Again, A Pushcart at the Curb; The Garbage Man, Airways, Inc. (plays).

*0thers: Poet Edna Vincent Millay, Feminist Ruth Hale, Writer Michael Gold, Humorist Dorothy Parker, Playwright John Howard Lawson.

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