Although some critics argue that John Dos Passos's second trilogy, District of Columbia (Adventures of a Young Man, 1939; Number One, 1943; and The Grand Design, 1949) is not as artistically powerful as his first trilogy, U.S.A., each of the novels creates a distinctive and memorable chronicle of the American effort to put liberalism into practice, and its subsequent disillusionment, during the Depression and World War II. Each moreover offers a variation on Dos Passos's increasing criticism of the efforts of both liberal and Communist movements to reshape the American experience after the economic collapses associated with the Great Depression and the global realignments brought about by U.S. participation in the Second World War and the rebuilding of Europe after the Allied victory. The trilogy articulates its author's final break with the several liberal movements with which he had been allied since World War I and...