num_pages: 556
description: Third in the trilogy U.S.A. . America in the boom years of the twenties is the setting of The Big Money. Hog-wild material prosperity rules the land and cripples the national life. Amid a vivid, fevered atmosphere of big business and bootleg booze, tinsel glamour and grinding injustice, Dos Passos guides his characters-a young mid-Westerner destroyed by his own success, an amoral trollop-turned-Hollywood star, an advertising boy-wonder on a careening treadmill of corruption, an idealistic girl discovering the facts of life - toward destinies that make a mockery of the American dream. The author's wonderful multiplicity of narrative techniques, his swift cross-cutting of points of view, never were used with greater effect than in this novel that Malcolm Cowley termed "a furious and sombre poem, written in a mood of revulsion even more powerful than that which T. S. Eliot expressed in 'The Waste Land.'" It stands as the climactic novel of a trilogy Alfred Kazin calls "an epic of democracy" charged with "the energy of disenchantment."The 42nd Parrallel and Nineteen Nineteen are the first and second novels of U.S.A.. Together the trilogy forms a landmark achievement in American fiction.
language: English
title: The Big Money
titlecomplete: The Big Money (USA)
genres: 20th Century, Literature, American, Classics, Literary Fiction, School, Novels, Historical Fiction, Fiction, The United States Of America
ratings_count: 2706
places: The United States of America
series: The U.S.A. Trilogy
publisher: New American Library (Signet Classic)