Like magic goggles, showing you the poetry of New York.
— Sarah
Surely deserving of a place among the great novels of the city of New York. Dos Passos’s high-speed interborough epic, published in 1925, darts kinetically between decades, class strata and neighborhoods, painting a vivid portrait of a metropolis and its metamorphoses.
— TomConsidered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike.
From Fourteenth Street to the Bowery, Delmonico's to the underbelly of the city waterfront, Dos Passos chronicles the lives of characters struggling to become a part of modernity before they are destroyed by it.
"A novel of the very first importance" (Sinclair Lewis), Manhattan Transfer is a masterpiece of modern fiction and a lasting tribute to the dual-edged nature of the American dream.
John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was a writer, painter, and political activist. His service as an ambulance driver in Europe at the end of World War I led him to write Three Soldiers in 1919, the first in a series of works that established him as one of the most prolific, inventive, and influential American writers of the twentieth century, writing over forty books, including plays, poetry, novels, biographies, histories, and memoirs.
"A novel of the very first importance." - Sinclair Lewis —