After Manhattan Transfer (1927) one remembered the name of John Dos Passos. After The Forty-second Parallel one looked eagerly forward to the succeeding members of the trilogy (for something of that order seemed to be promised) in the conviction that we had here a work demanding serious attention as no other appearing under the head of the novel during the past two or three years had done. Nineteen-nineteen is a challenge to justify the conviction.

The Forty-second Parallel established Mr. Dos Passos as an unusually serious artist—serious with the seriousness that expresses itself in the propagandist spirit…. [He] cannot be interested in individuals without consciously relating them to the society and the civilisation that make the individual life possible. (p. 102)

The undertaking involves a peculiar technical problem, one that none of the methods customarily associated with the novel will meet. No amount of enthusiasm for collective humanity will...