John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion,...

Over the course of six pre-Code films produced by Paramount in the 1930s, Dietrich and von Sternberg refined their shared fantasy of pleasure, beauty, and excess. Dietrich's coolly transgressive mystique was a perfect match for the provocative roles von Sternberg cast her in.

“It is not simply that [Dos Passos] has a keen eye for people, but that he has a keen eye for so many different kinds of people.”—The New York Times

Marking the end of “one of the most ambitious projects that an American novelist has ever undertaken” (Time), The Big Money brings us back to America after the Great War, a nation on the upswing. Industrialism booms. The stock market surges.

...

He rose from a childhood as the illegitimate son of a financial titan to become the man Sartre called "the greatest writer of our time." A progressive writer who turned his passions into the groundbreaking U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos later embraced conservative causes. At the height of his career he was considered a peer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, yet he died in obscurity in 1970. Award-winning biographer Virginia Spencer Carr examines the contradictions...