(August 10, 1936)

To relate the minutiae of contemporary experience to the broad sweep of historical developments has been the task, for the past ten years, of a novelist names John Roderigo Dos Passos. Last week Author Dos Passos, 40, offered readers a novel called The Big Money that stood midway between history and fiction, the last of a series of three books that constitute a private, unofficial history of the U.S. from 1900 to 1929.

With The Big Money John Dos Passos brought to a close one of the most ambitious projects that any U.S. novelist has undertaken. The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money run to 1,449 pages, detail the careers of some 13 major characters and a host of minor ones, picture such widely separated locales as pre-War Harvard, Wartime Paris, Miami during the Florida boom, Hollywood, Greenwich Village, Detroit.

By the time readers have followed the careers of Dos Passos' characters, studied the sharp, ironic sketches of U.S. public heroes, absorbed the confusion and hysteria of the Newsreels, they are likely to feel that they have received a vivid cross-section report on some U.S. history in a manner neither novelists nor historians supply. They may question whether ordinary private life during that period was as confused and chaotic as Dos Passos represents it, whether he has not overshot his mark in bringing so many of his characters to violent ends, so many of their hopes to tragic frustrations. But they can admire without reservation his narrative style, bare but not bleak, naturalistic but not dull, and his cunning blend of the literary and the colloquial. Dos Passos believes that a writer's modest job is to be an "architect of history." He never talks about creation in connection with his work. His job, he feels, is simply to arrange the materials, confining any artistic high jinks to decoration that will enhance the outlines of the building of without weakening its structure.