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In July 1917, a year after leaving Harvard, John Dos Passos volunteered as an ambulance driver in France, alongside E. E. Cummings. He later called the war his university. Out of it came Three Soldiers (1921), then Manhattan Transfer (1925), a New York novel cut together from dozens of lives, and the U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), which mixes fiction with newspaper headlines, song lyrics, short biographies of Henry Ford or Woodrow Wilson, and fragments of his own memory. In 1998 the Modern Library placed U.S.A. 23rd among the best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre had called him “the greatest writer of our time” in 1936; by the 1960s he was campaigning for Barry Goldwater. This guide covers his 12 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1920–1966 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
John Dos Passos published more than forty books. The best known are Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the three novels of the U.S.A. trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). Start with Manhattan Transfer: it is a single volume and shows the collage method he later stretched across the whole trilogy.
Where to Start with John Dos Passos
If you want one book that shows his method
→ Manhattan Transfer (1925) — New York from the 1890s to the 1920s in a single volume.
If you want his masterpiece
→ The 42nd Parallel (1930) — the first volume of U.S.A.; read the trilogy in order.
If you want a First World War novel
→ Three Soldiers (1921) — the book that made his name in 1921.
If you want the later, disillusioned Dos Passos
→ Number One (1943) — a Southern demagogue seen from inside his campaign.
12 John Dos Passos Books, in Order
One Man’s Initiation
His first novel, a short book drawn from his months as a volunteer ambulance driver in France in 1917. It follows a young American, Martin Howe, through the front-line sectors and the arguments of soldiers about what the war is for. It was reissued in 1945 as First Encounter.
Three Soldiers
Three American privates in the army in France: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and John Andrews, a Harvard-educated musician who eventually deserts. Its picture of the army as a machine that grinds men down caused controversy on publication, while H. L. Mencken called it the best war story yet produced in America.
Manhattan Transfer
New York from the 1890s to the late 1920s, told in fragments of overlapping lives: the actress Ellen Thatcher, the journalist Jimmy Herf, the lawyer-turned-politician George Baldwin, and Bud Korpenning, a farmhand who comes to the city and never finds his footing. Sinclair Lewis called it “a novel of the very first importance”, and D. H. Lawrence the best modern book about New York he had read.
The 42nd Parallel
The first volume of U.S.A., covering America from 1900 up to its entry into the First World War. It introduces characters such as Mac, a printer drawn into the labour movement, and J. Ward Moorehouse, a public-relations man, and interleaves their stories with Newsreel collages, Camera Eye passages and short biographies of public figures.
1919
The second volume covers the war years and the peace conference at Versailles, following new characters including Richard Ellsworth Savage and Anne Elizabeth Trent, known as Daughter. It ends with “The Body of an American”, the story of the Unknown Soldier buried at Arlington.
The Big Money
The last volume runs from the boom of the 1920s to the crash, following the war hero turned aviation businessman Charley Anderson, the actress Margo Dowling and the activist Mary French. Its biographies include Henry Ford, and one of its Camera Eye sections, written after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, contains the line “all right we are two nations”.
Adventures of a Young Man
A young American radical, Glenn Spotswood, moves through the labour and Communist politics of the 1930s and goes to fight for the Spanish Republic, where he is killed. It grew out of the same 1937 trip to Spain as Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and its hostility to the Communist Party cost Dos Passos much of his left-wing readership.
Number One
Tyler Spotswood, Glenn’s brother and an alcoholic campaign manager, helps elect a corrupt Southern politician, Chuck Crawford, known as “Number One”, to the U.S. Senate, and is later made to take the blame for a scandal. Crawford is widely read as a portrait of Huey Long of Louisiana, whom Dos Passos had observed in person.
The Grand Design
The closing volume moves to Washington under the New Deal and follows the idealists who come to run its agencies. Like the earlier two books it reflects his growing disillusionment with radical politics and New Deal liberalism. The three novels were published together as District of Columbia in 1952.
Chosen Country
His most autobiographical novel, about a young man of mixed Portuguese and American background, Jay Pignatelli, who grows up outside the conventional family and has to make America his own. It draws on his own childhood as the son of a wealthy lawyer, and on his marriage to Katharine Smith, who died in 1947.
Midcentury
A late return to the methods of U.S.A.: fictional lives mixed with documentary passages and biographical sketches of figures such as Douglas MacArthur, Jimmy Hoffa, John L. Lewis and James Dean, aimed this time at union bosses, government and corporations. It spent fifteen weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.
The Best Times
His memoir of the years from his childhood to the 1930s: Harvard, the ambulance corps, Paris and Spain, and friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and E. E. Cummings. It is a book about the good years and leaves out most of the political quarrels that ended some of those friendships.
In What Order to Read John Dos Passos
The two trilogies should be read in order: The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money for U.S.A., and Adventures of a Young Man, Number One and The Grand Design for District of Columbia. Characters cross from one volume to the next, and the Newsreels move forward year by year.
The rest stands alone. Publication order shows the arc of his career: from the anti-war novels, through the great experiments of 1925–1936, to the later books in which the same techniques are turned against the left he had once belonged to.
A reading path
1. Manhattan Transfer (1925)
2. The 42nd Parallel (1930)
3. 1919 (1932)
4. The Big Money (1936)
5. Adventures of a Young Man (1939)
Everything Else John Dos Passos Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 10 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
3
3 books · 1923–1958
- 1923Streets of Nightan early novel of young people in Boston and Cambridge
- 1954Most Likely to Succeeda novel about a playwright in the radical theatre and Hollywood
- 1958The Great Daysa novel about an ageing journalist
Travel, history and reportage
7
7 books · 1922–1975
- 1922Rosinante to the Road Againessays on Spain
- 1927Orient Expresstravels in the Middle East
- 1934In All Countriesreportage from Europe, Mexico and the Soviet Union
- 1938Journeys Between Warscollected travel writing
- 1941The Ground We Stand Onhistory of early American democratic thought
- 1954The Head and Heart of Thomas Jeffersonhistory and biography
- 1975Century’s Ebbhis last novel, published after his death
The years · 1896–1970
Quick facts about John Dos Passos
- Known for
- John Dos Passos is known for building novels out of montage, mixing fictional lives with headlines, songs, biographies and memory to portray the United States in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
- 1896
- Born in Chicago
- 1917
- Ambulance driver in France
- 1936
- The Big Money completes U.S.A.
- 1947
- Car accident kills his wife Katharine
- 1970
- Dies in Baltimore
- Born
- 14 January 1896, Chicago, Illinois; son of the lawyer John Randolph Dos Passos
- Education
- Choate School; Harvard College, graduated 1916
- War service
- Volunteer ambulance driver in France and Italy, 1917–1918, then the U.S. Army Medical Corps
- Marriages
- Katharine Foster Smith (killed in a car accident in 1947); Elizabeth Holdridge, from 1949, with whom he had a daughter
- Honours
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (1947); Antonio Feltrinelli Prize (1967)
- Died
- 28 September 1970, Baltimore, Maryland, aged 74
The red mark is 1936: The Big Money, which completed the U.S.A. trilogy.
How John Dos Passos Writes: The Novel as Montage
Dos Passos trained as an observer before he was a novelist; in his 1969 Paris Review interview he said that “the desire to observe, to put down what you see as accurately as possible, is still paramount.” Manhattan Transfer applies that to a whole city: short scenes from more than a dozen lives, cut against each other with no single hero, an approach often compared to the film montage of Sergei Eisenstein and to Joyce’s Ulysses.
In U.S.A. he formalised the method into four alternating modes. The fictional narratives follow twelve characters. The Newsreels collage headlines and popular songs of the moment. The biographies are compressed prose portraits of real Americans, from Henry Ford to Woodrow Wilson. The Camera Eye sections are stream-of-consciousness passages drawn from his own life. No mode explains the others; the reader puts them together.
The later books keep the technique but change the target. Number One and Midcentury aim the same documentary eye at party machines, union bosses and the federal government, which is one reason critics who had praised U.S.A. as a radical book were cooler towards them, and why his reputation declined in his lifetime.
Listen
John Dos Passos at the 92nd Street Y, 1965
John Dos Passos reads portraits and Camera Eye sections from the U.S.A. trilogy and from Midcentury at the 92nd Street Y in New York on 18 January 1965, introduced by Robert Gorham Davis, followed by audience questions. From the archive of the 92nd Street Y.
Frequently asked questions about John Dos Passos’s books
How many books has John Dos Passos written?
More than forty, including novels, travel writing, history, plays and poetry. Twelve are the key books on this page, from One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) to his memoir The Best Times (1966); the rest are listed under “Everything Else”.
What are John Dos Passos’s books in order?
One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920), Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925), The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936), Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), The Grand Design (1949), Chosen Country (1951), Midcentury (1961) and The Best Times (1966).
Where should I start with John Dos Passos?
Manhattan Transfer (1925). It is one volume and shows the collage method he later used across the U.S.A. trilogy. If it works for you, go on to The 42nd Parallel and read the trilogy in order.
What is John Dos Passos’s most famous book?
The U.S.A. trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936), later published as a single volume. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked it 23rd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Manhattan Transfer is his best-known single novel.
In what order should I read the U.S.A. trilogy?
The 42nd Parallel (1930), then 1919 (1932), then The Big Money (1936). The volumes move forward in time from 1900 to the Depression, and several characters continue from one book into the next.
What are the Newsreel and Camera Eye sections in U.S.A.?
Two of its four alternating modes. The Newsreels are collages of headlines, news items and song lyrics from the period, 68 in all. The Camera Eye sections are stream-of-consciousness passages based on Dos Passos’s own experience. The other two modes are the fictional narratives and short biographies of real public figures.
Why did John Dos Passos move from left to right, and why did he fall out with Hemingway?
In the 1920s and early 1930s Dos Passos was on the radical left: he campaigned for Sacco and Vanzetti, visited the Soviet Union in 1928 and served on the Dewey Commission on the charges against Trotsky. In 1937 he went to Spain during the Civil War with Ernest Hemingway. His friend and Spanish translator, José Robles, had disappeared and was executed by Republican authorities as an alleged spy; historians have linked the killing to Soviet agents. Dos Passos rejected the spy charge and pressed for answers, while Hemingway accepted the killing as necessary in time of war, and their friendship ended. Dos Passos turned against Communism and, from the 1950s, moved to the right: he wrote for National Review and campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968. Stephen Koch’s The Breaking Point (2005) tells the Robles story in detail.
Have John Dos Passos’s novels been adapted?
Not into major films. U.S.A. was adapted for the stage as a dramatic revue by Paul Shyre together with Dos Passos, and as a 1968 audio production for Caedmon. Dos Passos himself worked on the screenplay of Josef von Sternberg’s film The Devil Is a Woman (1935), starring Marlene Dietrich.
Is John Dos Passos still alive?
No. He was born on 14 January 1896 in Chicago and died on 28 September 1970 in Baltimore, aged 74. His last novel, Century’s Ebb, was published after his death, in 1975.
Did John Dos Passos win a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize?
No. His honours include election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1947 and the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize, presented in Rome in 1967.
Footnotes
- John Dos Passos — Wikipedia
- U.S.A. (trilogy) — Wikipedia
- Manhattan Transfer (novel) — Wikipedia
- José Robles — Wikipedia
- John Dos Passos, The Art of Fiction No. 44 — The Paris Review, 1969
- John Dos Passos — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I think the desire to observe, to put down what you see as accurately as possible, is still paramount.”
— John Dos Passos, interview in The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 44 (1969)
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