The first book in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, The 42nd Parallel takes a widescreen approach to the early years of the 20th century. Apush Notes American Pageant 13th Edition more.

In the novels that make up the trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—Dos Passos creates an. A founder of The Library of America. John Dos Passos. Apr 25, 2012 Even in 2012, one of the more striking traits about John Dos Passos was his tendency to write about the American immigrant experience in a complete circle.

Instead of focusing on a single character or family or even town or city, Dos Passos writes of a variety of apparently disconnected Americans—what connections exist between them do not appear until late in the book. There’s Mac, the wandering printer and sometime crusader for the working man. There’s Janey, a young stenographer in DC; Eleanor, who works in a Chicago laceshop; marketing man Johnny Moorehouse, and mechanic Charley Anderson. All of these characters differ in life situations but are united in their working-class roots and a longing for something else, something more. The stories of how they go about getting it (or not) make up the bulk of the book.

Interspersed among the chapters on the central characters are short, experimental segments that add flavor and broaden the world of the novel. The “Newsreels” offer soundbites and images from actual newsreels of the time—sort of like historical montages in a film set in the past. More real-life history is offered in the short biographical portraits of such men as Thomas Edison and Eugene V. And the stream-of-consciousness “The Camera Eye” passages take readers into what is apparently the mind of the author as he narrates bits of his own life story. Teresa: One of the things that struck me when reading The 42nd Parallel is how modern it feels.