[An] attitude of determined omniscience informs all of U.S.A., even the biographical sections. Of the five historical personages who were still alive when Dos Passos wrote about them, none retains any control over his own destiny; that privilege is reserved for the abstract forces of history conceived under the aegis of Marxist-Veblenian determinism. The biography of Thomas Edison is oblique in emphasis; its subject, discussed in the past tense, is unable to free himself from his obsolete and socially dangerous work ethic because "he never worried about mathematics or the social system or generalized historical concepts." Henry Ford waits in seclusion for death, helpless and uncomprehending before the changes he has brought about. Orville Wright, left behind by a historical process gone wrong, lives an authentic life only in other people's memories…. Such are the lives of those who are swept up in the dialectic of...