Dos Passos, John (©1921) Three Soldiers – First Edition, First Printing, Second State WWI Hemingway

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Dos Passos, John. Three Soldiers. (George H. Doran: New York, ND (©1921). First Edition, first printing, second state.

12mo. 3 blank integral leaves followed by 433 pages and no blank leaves following.  Top edge of text block is publisher stained orange.  Bound in black cloth with title, author and a set of 3 vertical lines at the top left each progressively smaller than the previous, mirrored on the right.  THREE / SOLDIERS / III / DOS PASSOS / DORAN on spine, all printing on the cover is in a odd sort of orange color except that the author’s name on the front cover is black on an orange block.  First issue “signing” replaced with “singing” on page 213, line 7 from the bottom. and is darker than the rest of the printing on that page showing that the change had been made recently.  No colophon for Doran on copyright page. On the “Books by John Dos Passos” page, the only published books mentioned are One Man’s Initiation and Three Soldiers while two others are listed as “In Preparation.” Listed in Johnson’s High Spots of American Literature.  “A bitter invective against what he conceived as ‘the tyranny, misery, and degradation of life in the American army'” during World War I according to Monthly Bulletin of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (1922).

Condition: Book is clean and crisp with an almost imperceptible lean to the spine. No marks of ownership are present. No dust jacket is present.

John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist and artist active in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He was well-traveled, visiting Europe and the Middle East, where he learned about literature, art, and architecture. During World War I, he was an ambulance driver for American volunteer groups in Paris and Italy before joining the United States Army Medical Corps.

“In 1920 his first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, was published, and in 1925 his novel, Manhattan Transfer, became a commercial success. In 1928, he went to the Soviet Union to study socialism, and later became a leading participant in the 1935 First American Writers Congress sponsored by the communist-leaning League of American Writers. He was in Spain in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The murder of his friend José Robles soured his attitude toward communism, and led to severing his relationship with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway.

“Dos Passos is best known for his U.S.A. trilogy, which consists of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). In 1998, the Modern Library ranked the U.S.A. Trilogy 23rd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.”