John Dos Passos 
Three Soldiers (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 



The shock of the First World War defined the twentieth century for John Dos Passos and many others of his generation. After serving in a French volunteer ambulance service and then with the American Army in France, Dos Passos wrote his novel
Three Soldiers (1921). The novel follows the intersecting lives of three Americans as they suffer the war’s monotonous and dehumanizing military routine and contemplate escape or revolt against its grinding discipline and extraordinary horrors.

Three Soldiers demonstrates the guiding principle shared by Dos Passos and other expatriate American writers that a new age called for a new art, one schooled by new ways of seeing afforded by modern technologies. His recognition of the machine age placed Dos Passos at the center of his century’s new artistic developments, and for his literary accomplishments Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as ‘the greatest writer of our time.’

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Born in Chicago in 1896,
John Dos Passos was raised outside of conventional, respectable nineteenth-century family arrangements as the illegitimate child of the attorney John R. Dos Passos and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison. He received an excellent education, attending Choate and Harvard. He is best known for his 1937 trilogy of novels,
U.S.A., which begins with
The 42nd Parallel, follows with
1919, and ends with
The Big Money.