By John Dos Passos, 1921, eBook Provided by Pennsylvania State University, 2004

“I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time.” —Jean-Paul Sartre

Wikepedia: Three Soldiers is a 1921 novel by the American writer and critic John Dos Passos. It is one of the key American war novels of the First World War, and remains a classic of the realist war novel genre.

H.L. Mencken, then practising primarily as an American literary critic, praised the book in the pages of the Smart Set. "Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it--and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."

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Book Description:

Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence, and the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine on ordinary soldiers.

About the Author:

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was born in Chicago and graduated from Harvard in 1916. His service as an ambulance driver in Europe at the end of World War I led him to write Three Soldiers in 1919. A prolific travel writer, biographer, playwright, and novelist, he is an American classic of the twentieth century.

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