America in the boom years of the twenties is the setting of The Big Money. Hog-wild material prosperity rules the land and cripples the national life. Amid a vivid, fevered atmosphere of big business and bootleg booze, tinsel glamour and grinding injustice, Dos Passos guides his characters - a young mid-Westerner destroyed by his own success, an amoral trollop-turned-Hollywood star, an advertising boy-wonder on a careening treadmill of corruption, an idealistic girl discovering the facts of life - toward destinies that make a mockery of the American dream. The author's wonderful multiplicity of narrative techniques, his swift cross-cutting of points of view, never were used with greater effect than in this novel that Malcolm Cowley termed "a furious and sombre poem, written in a mood of revulsion even more powerful than that which T. S. Eliot expressed in 'The Waste Land.'" It stands as the climactic novel of a trilogy Alfred Kazin calls "an epic of democracy" charged with "the energy of disenchantment."

The U.S.A. trilogy consists of:
The 42nd Parallel (1930)
Nineteen Nineteen (1932)
The Big Money (1936)

cover title: The Big Money: A Novel from The Great Trilogy U.S.A.

description: xxiii, 557 p.: ill.; 18cm