DON PASSOS, John. [The USA Trilogy] Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company 1946
3 Volumes, 8vo. Original cream cloth boards; gilt titled spines with brown morocco labels; boards with bevelled edges; illustrated endpapers; top edges gilt; black and white illustrations within the text by Reginald Marsh, pages untrimmed and partially unopened; acetate dust jackets and original dark red slipcase with title label in green and black; slipcase split along the sides and coming undone with tape repairs and significant chips along sides; dust jacket panels slightly toned but text body internally fine; other than slipcase a near fine set.
Signed limited edition inscribed by the writer to his first bibliographer, Jack Potter. Marked as number 279 of 350 sets. Inscription reads, "To Jack Potter, best wishes, John Dos Passos, Chicago, Oct 31 '54" ~b~.
The USA Trilogy was first published in 1937, in a volume entitled U.S.A. The 42nd Parallel 1919 and The Big Money were originally published in 1930, 1932 and 1936 respectively and for which Dos Passos is best known. The trilogy traces the historical evolution of American society during the beginning three decades of the twentieth Century in an unusual nonlinear and experimental style, a technique which includes the incorporation of song lyrics (christened "Newsreels") and clippings of newspaper articles collaged beside the stories of multiple fictional narrators. Dos Passos also composed using an autobiographical form of stream of conciousness writing which he named the workings of a "Camera Eye" and which had considerable influence over writers such as Jean Paul Sartre. The trilogy was written during a period in which Dos Passos aligned himself with the politics of the Left, before the 1950's in which disillusionment following the Spanish Civil War propelled him towards more of a contrary conservative outlook. Regardless, The USA Trilogy was a creation that followed the publication of his novel Manhattan Transfer~i~, which lent his stream of consciousness technique to a commercial platform, and demonstrated John Dos Passos' beginning as a social revolutionary.
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