The 42nd Parallel

The 42nd Parallel is the opening volume of John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, which continues with 1919 and The Big Money. The Modern Library has named the trilogy one of the best books of the twentieth century. Rather than following a single straight narrative, Dos Passos assembles a sweeping picture of American life from short stories interleaved with "newsreel" sections made of front-page headlines and article fragments from the Chicago Tribune.

The novel follows five people, Mac, Janey, Eleanor, Ward, and Charley, whose fortunes rise and fall as they are drawn toward New York. Their paths intersect, separate, and sometimes circle back on one another. Real public figures, including Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie, also make appearances on the page.

Dos Passos also includes brief biographical sketches of prominent Americans and intensely personal, impressionistic passages that he calls Camera Eye sections. Together with the newsreels and the fictional storylines, these techniques give the book its panoramic, mosaic structure.

The author was an American novelist who wrote while contemporaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were cultivating their own more contained literary territory. The critic Edmund Wilson remarked on that difference, and Dos Passos instead set out to take in the whole country.