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By Bill Altreuter

Some of it has to be expectation, after all. When you figure on liking something, your choices are to really like it or to be disappointed, and who wants the let down? Still, as I continue my march through A New Literary History of America what I'm finding is that I'm having more and more fun. The early history stuff has been interesting, and the 19th century stuff put a gloss on some things that I hadn't known, but now I'm rounding into the stuff that I know about, and it is like a day at the fair. Walter Mosley on hard boiled fiction, Werner Sollors on "The Sound and the Fury" ("Had he stopped writting on Easter Sunday 1928, William Faulkner wold be remembered as a regional Lost Generation author....") and Phobe Kosman on John Dos Passos have me jumping out of my skin. Ms. Kosman on Dos Passos in particular really gets it: "For all of its magic, for all of its empathy and scope and imagination, the trilogy remains not-quite-canonical; there are plenty of well-read Americans who would be unashamed to admit they haven't read it. The question that occurs to any entranced reader of "USA" is, How is this not huge? What happened?"

That nails how I feel about the trilogy-- arguably the most overlooked work in our literature. Why? Well, maybe because the only other thing Dos Passos did that was worth a damn was "Manhattan Transfer", and that's not an easy way in. (It is also more or less a study for what was to follow, the way that "In Dubious Battle" was Steinbeck learning how to write "Grapes of Wrath".) Maybe because the "USA" novels are experimental fiction, and the things that Dos Passos was doing were so quickly absorbed as mainstream technique that his inventions quickly seemed old fashioned. I feel bad about my passion for poor old Dos-- the only person I've ever met that pressed his books on someone else was my dad, who gave them to me. I have never suggested that my daughters, or A, for that matter, read "The 42nd Parallel" or the rest of the trilogy, or pressed it on anyone else, but I remain steadfast in my belief that Dos Passos stands in the first tier of American writers. Oddly, he was a writer who was concerned with the macro aspects of American life, but he is, it seems, a personal obsession-- someone who his fans keep to themselves.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on February 21, 2010 (boomark / email).