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Studies in American Fiction233 would like to show [Lincoln] Steffens more of his work" (p. 59). Hadley attempted to dissuade Hemingway from publishing The Torrents of Spring, a vicious parody of his former Uterary mentors, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. Nevertheless, the only reaction that Mrs. Sokoloff was able to elicit from her to Ernest's cruel exposure of their friends in an unmistakable roman a clef, The Sun Abo Rises, was "Hadley was happy and excited and thought the book magnificient" (p. 82). Thedeficiencies of themarriage which led to Ernest's infideUty with Pauline Pfeiffer and his divorce from Hadley seem inexplicable in the Ught of Mrs. SokolofPs breathless summation written in the stacatto sentences in which, as elsewhere in the book, she seems to be imitating the Hemingway style: "Everything had been gala with Ernest. Everythinghadbeen the greatestfun. And it had ended at just the right time" (p. 101). The William Paterson College of New JerseyStanley Wertheim Landsberg, Melvin. Dos Passos' Path to U.S.A. Boulder: The Colorado Associated U. Press, 1972. 292 pp. Cloth: $10.00. Becker, George J. John Dos Passos. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974. 133 pp. Cloth: $6.00. Hook, Andrew, ed. Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc, 1974. 186 pp. Paperback: $2.45. The restoration of John Dos Passos has reaUy just begun. During the late 1940s and all of the 1950s he was regarded by critics with something less than the esteem accorded him during his most productive period: the 1920s and the Great Depression. Even as the reputations of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were steadilyrisingafter World War II, Dos Passos remained for most of this time Uttle more than the occasional subject of an article or a chapter in a book. He had not been accorded until 1961 a single American volume-length analysis. He was aesthetically and philosophically outside the mainstream. He had been dismissed by the aesthetic and formalist critics in recoil from realism and naturalism. Furthermore, during the long period of Cold War hostility, McCarthyite hysteria, ideological xenophobia, and cultural conformity, Dos Passos was ignored or feared by the literary and political Right, some of whose members viewed his early radicalism as a still imminent threat to the survival of the Republic, and chastized and spurned by the Left, much of whose ideology he had long since rejected. Even during the lean period, however, Dos Passos' literary reputation was nourished by such critics and literary historians as GranviUe Hicks, Blanche GeIfant, WalterRideout, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, and Arthur Mizener. In the last decade, a modest number of books, reflective and appreciative, haveappeared. Probably noneof the recentstudies wül do as much to enhance Dos Passos' overaU reputation as an artist and an influence as will The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos (1973), a posthumously published collection of diary fragments and letters gleaned from his entire life and revealing the private as weU as the public Dos Passos. Here one discovers what his novels and chronicles and the books about him seldom show: his exuberance in friendship and travel; his warmth and humor, especiaUy revealed in letters to his young friend Walter Rumsey Marvin; his boyhood loneliness; his dedication to literary form; the full extent of his pity and despair for suffering Americans; his frustration over the failure of the liberal 234Reviews and radical Left to save Sacco and Vanzetti from execution in 1927; his movement to the Right in later years, a movement evolving as much from his desire to confirm his roots in Jeffersonian liberalism as from his increasing distrust of centralized government and bureaucracy. Probably no reader of The Fourteenth Chronicle will complete it without experiencing Dos Passos as more than a detached observer of the darker side of recent American History or, in Malcolm Cowley's somewhat disparaging phrase, "a collective novelist." However, as an adjunctto Dos Passos' ownnovels andchronicles, Melvin Landsberg's study Dos Passos' Path to U.S.A. will serve very weU. Published before The Fourteenth Chronicle, it is the most valuable of the three books under discussion, an exhaustive and fascinating journey up the road to the...

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