The reader of Dos Passos … is not required to have much more reading agility than the reader of the daily press. Nor does Dos Passos make many more serious demands than a good movie. And this is said not to belittle an excellent writer who has much to offer, but to draw attention to the extreme simplification to which Dos Passos has submitted the early work of James Joyce. Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U. S. A. (1930–36) would not exist in their present form but for the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners and Ulysses. It is as a slightly super-realist that Dos Passos has viewed and adapted the work of Joyce in his own work. (pp. 148-49)

From [the imagists Dos Passos] learned much that has continuously affected his practice. Their romantic tapestries and static contemplation of the ornate panorama of existence have always...