Three Soldiers

John Dos Passos

Apr 2012 · Courier Corporation

About this ebook

This grimly realistic depiction of army life follows a trio of idealists as they contend with the regimentation, violence, and boredom of military service. Fuselli, a San Francisco store clerk, embraces conformity in the hopes of a promotion. Chrisfield, an Indiana farm boy, and Andrews, a gifted musician, are repelled by the army's mind-numbing routines and battlefield horrors. Incited past the point of endurance, the soldiers respond with rancor and murderous rage. This powerful exploration of warfare's dehumanizing effects remains chillingly contemporary. Unabridged republication of the classic 1921 edition.

About the author

John Dos Passos, 1896 - 1970 John Passos was born January 14,1896 to John Randolph Dos Passos and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison. He attended Harvard University from 1912-1916. He was in the ambulance service units in France and Italy and in 1918, enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. From 1926-29, he directed New Playwrights' Theatre in New York City. In 1929, Passos married Katharine Smith and in 1947, they were in an automobile accident that killed his wife and left him blind in one eye. He married Elizabeth Holdridge in 1949 and a year later, Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos was born. Passos' many novels include "One Man's Initiation" (1917), "Three Soldiers" (1921), which has met with wide acclaim, "Streets of Night" (1923), "Facing the Chair" (1927), which defends the immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, "Orient Express" (1927), "The Ground We Stand On" (1949), and "Prospects of a Golden Age" (1959). He received the Gold Medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, the Feltrinelli Prize for Fiction in 1967 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1947. On September 28, 1970, Passos died of heart failure in Baltimore, Maryland.