Three Soldiers (cover of novel by John Dos Passos)

''Three Soldiers'' is a 1921 novel by American writer and critic

John Dos Passos John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his ''U.S.A.'' trilogy. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visit ...

. It is one of the American

war novel A war novel or military fiction is a novel about war. It is a novel in which the primary action takes place on a battlefield, or in a civilian setting (or home front), where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, suffering the ...

s of the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

, and remains a classic of the realist war novel

genre Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other f ...

Background

H. L. Mencken praised the book in the pages of ''

The Smart Set ''The Smart Set'' was an American literary magazine, founded by Colonel William d'Alton Mann and published from March 1900 to June 1930. Its headquarters was in New York City. During its Jazz Age heyday under the editorship of H. L. Mencken and ...

'':

"Until ''Three Soldiers'' is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it—and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."Henry Louis Mencken, "Portrait of an American Citizen," ''Smart Set'', 69 (October 1922) 140-2, in ''Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews'', ed. Margaret Anne O'Conner, Cambridge UP, 2001 (141–143)

References

External links

''Three Soldiers'' Webpage
Official John Dos Passos Website (est. Oct. 2013 by the Dos Passos Family)
Text of ''Three Soldiers''

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...

* 1921 American novels Novels set during World War I Anti-war novels George H. Doran Company books {{1920s-WWI-novel-stub