[We] have now had more than twenty years to digest Manhattan Transfer and fully ten years to come to terms with the completed trilogy of U.S.A. In books like Journeys between Wars, The Ground We Stand On, and State of the Nation, Dos Passos has exhibited his personal outlook upon the world, furnishing us the context in which to consider his "dramatic" representations of life. We should now be in a position to challenge this figure and ask ourselves what and how great is his significance for literary art.
The first thing we can say with a considerable degree of confidence is that his work before Manhattan Transfer is negligible, that his volumes of travel and commentary are relatively negligible, and that his place in literature (thus far) must rest on four novels, Manhattan Transfer and the three parts of U.S.A. The poems are negligible except as a reminder, important for understanding him, that this man is by natural inclination distinctly "esthetic"—drawn to the picturesque, the decorative, the exotic, and to the romantic in the sense in which that term applies to Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher…. The influence of Sandburg is strongly felt in Manhattan Transfer in the language and arrangement of the prose poems prefixed to the chapters. But the influence of Sandburg means a passage from the mere cult of the exotic to a more robust grappling with the familiar,—from the esthetic as evasion to the esthetic as significant composition.
