It has been inevitable throughout this discussion that the original, inventive techniques the young novelist created for this collage of narratives are suited ideally to his themes of alienation and the pressures of perverse value systems. These techniques form the foundation for Dos Passos's artistic signatures in the U.S.A. and District trilogies as well as his final major novel, Midcentury (1961). His creation was inspired by James Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses (1922), T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), and experiments with collage as a film technique by Soviet director Sergi Eisenstein, whom Dos Passos met during a 1928 trip to the U.S.S.R.

Out of these diverse sources Dos Passos invented his own literary collage, a concept that involves the assimilation of diverse narrative and visual materials. The chapters are introduced by prose poems, hortatory evocations of history, snippets from the popular press, and sound bites from the...