Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos

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Résumé :
John Dos Passos' ground breaking novel Manhattan Transfer is a landmark literary achievement. The book attacks the consumerism and social indifference of contemporary American urban life, portraying a Manhattan that is merciless yet teeming with energy, restlessness, and possibilities that too few will ultimately share. Manhattan Transfer was inspired in part by James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. In it we meet a large ensemble cast of characters who are struggling, failing, and some few succeeding in the brutally, exciting New York City of the Jazz Age. A novel of the very first importance. The dawn of a whole new school of writing. -Sinclair Lewis The best modern book about New York. -D. H. Lawrence [Dos Passos] has been able to show to Europeans the America they really find when they come here. -Ernest Hemingway

Biographie:
John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was an American novelist, journalist, and political commentator associated with early twentieth-century modernism. Best known for Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, he developed innovative narrative techniques combining fiction, reportage, and montage. His work remains central to discussions of American modernist literature and the social history of the interwar period....

Sommaire:
First published in 1925, Manhattan Transfer is John Dos Passos's landmark modernist novel portraying New York City as both setting and protagonist. Through a mosaic of intersecting lives-clerks, immigrants, journalists, dreamers, financiers-Dos Passos constructs a fragmented yet cohesive portrait of early twentieth-century Manhattan. The novel abandons conventional linear narrative in favor of shifting perspectives, compressed scenes, and rhythmic montage, capturing the velocity and impersonality of urban existence. Individual ambition collides with economic reality, while personal identity dissolves within the machinery of modern life. A precursor to Dos Passos's later U.S.A. trilogy, Manhattan Transfer stands as one of the defining American novels of the 1920s. Its experimental structure and documentary realism reflect the influence of journalism, cinema, and modernist technique, offering a vivid chronicle of a city in transition. This Wilder Publications edition presents the text in a clean and carefully prepared modern format for contemporary readers....