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Abstract

Scholars became interested in the life and writing of John Dos Passos as early as the 1920s. In 1931, for instance, a German Ph.D. student, Werner Neuse, decided to work on Dos Passos’s development as a writer at the Hessische Ludwigs-Universität, Giessen. At the time, Dos Passos had not yet completed his masterpiece, the U.S.A. trilogy. Only The 42nd Parallel had been published by 1930. Nineteen Nineteen appeared two years later, while The Big Money was released in 1936. And yet, in the early 1930s, Dos Passos was already a rising star in the literary firmament. He had acquired international fame with novels such as Three Soldiers (1921) and Manhattan Transfer (1925).