This section contains 532 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
The Big Money is the final and best third of Dos Passos's first trilogy, U.S.A. The other novels are The 42nd Parallel (1930) and Nineteen Nineteen (1932). The first, named for a geographical phenomenon, the direction in which high-level winds blow across the United States from east to west and thereby influence our weather, chronicles the evolution of radical American protest movements in the first decades of the twentieth century. Through the escapades of the likeable but aimless drifter Fenian McCreary ("Mac"), Dos Passos traces a sympathetic portrait of the I.W.W. or "Wobblies," America's first loosely organized radical movement. Even Charley Anderson, whom the author introduces as he grew up in Minnesota to close out the novel, briefly associates with the Wobblies. Dos Passos also includes sympathetic biographical sketches of Wobblies founder Big Bill Haywood and radical politician Eugene Debs, who once ran for...
This section contains 532 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |