John Dos Passos

Tyler Spotswood, an alcoholic campaign manager, helps elect a corrupt Southern politician to the U. S. Senate. When his boss, Chuck Crawford aka “Number One,” pins a scandal on Spotswood, Tyler is too drunk to blow the whistle. Number One draws many comparisons to Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Crawford reminds many of Louisiana politician Huey Long, a figure studied in person by Dos Passos.

Up From Liberalism is a political treatise written by conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. The book is a collection of essays and speeches that detail Buckley's journey from a young liberal in the 1950s to a prominent conservative voice in American politics. In the book, Buckley critiques the liberal ideology and argues for a return to conservative principles, such as limited government, free markets, and individual liberty. He also discusses his experiences founding the National Review magazine and his involvement in the conservative movement. Up From Liberalism is considered a seminal work in the conservative movement and has been praised for its intellectual rigor and persuasive arguments. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

'My literary hero is John Dos Passos' - Adam Curtis (filmmaker) 'Wonderful and extraordinary'Robert McCrum, Observer'No novelist in America has written more sombrely of the dangers to individual integrity in a centrally controlled society'Alfred KazinThe Penguin Modern Classics edition of John Dos Passos' U. S. A. is a groundbreaking work of experimental fiction which, with its unique melange of fact and fiction, creates a compelling, tragic vision of America at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this experimental trilogy, Dos Passos uses 'camera eye' and 'newsreel' sections to create a fragmented atmosphere. Through the testimony of numerous characters, both fictional and historical figures, he builds up a composite picture of American society in the first quarter of the 20th century. Richly detailed and throbbing with vitality, U. S. A. vividly evokes that uncertain period when America, so full of ideas and potential, was slowly and painfully abandoning the great American Dream. John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was born in Chicago, the son of an eminent lawyer. After graduating from Harvard he served in the US Army Medical Corps during the First World War, and dabbled in journalism before embarking on life as a writer. In 1925 he published Manhattan Transfer, his first experimental novel in what was to become his peculiar style - a mixture of fact and fiction. His began a series of panoramic epics of American life with the U. S. A. trilogy, using the same technique and tracing, through interwoven biographies, the story of America from the early twentieth century to the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

Based on his personal experiences in France during the First World War, Dos Passos' novel is a fierce denunciation of the military.

For this history, Dos Passos returns to the American colonial period and early nationhood, exploring the personalities who won the nation's independence from England: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, and George Washington. Originally called The World Turned Upside Down, The Men Who Made the Nation covers the period from 1781 to Hamilton's death in 1804. The work crystallizes the author's fascination with the psychology of the colonial freedom fighter and presents lessons for current American policymakers.

Despite sickness in the final years of his life, Dos Passos presses on for adventure. He and his wife journey to Easter Island, where they explore the history behind the famous statues--called maois. "When I was a small boy," Dos Passos says, "some kind person took me to the British Museum. There I saw a statue, a huge, rough, dark-gray statue with a] long, sad, dark-gray face. The statue stared back out of deep, sunken eyes. What was it trying to say? To this day I can remember the feeling it gave me of savage, brooding melancholy."

This selective history of Portugal reflects the author's fascination with his own Portuguese/Madeiran heritage. The work tracks the nation's rise and fall as a world power, drawing from the author's travels and archival research. "Dos Passos," writes historian J. H. Plumb, "brings to his material a novelist's acute eye for human character and a narrative skill that any historian might envy; and he has produced one of the most readable books on the subject that I know."

Based on the author's first-hand experience as an ambulance driver during World War I, this first novel is noteworthy for its vivid and colorful portrait of France at that time and for its passionate indictment of war. The author's disillusionment with war, for a time, turned him toward socialism and against capitalism. Finally, after being labeled "pro-German" and "pacifist," Dos Passos concluded that the quasi-religion of Marxism was far more brutal than "poor old Capitalism ever dreamed of." Reprinted from the unexpurgated original edition published by Cornell University Press in 1969.