Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence, and the brutal and dehumanizing...

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was a writer and a spiritual seeker, as well as a distinguished American painter. In his introduction to this generously illustrated volume, Townsend Ludington explores the relationships among Hartley's art, poetry, and essays. He traces the philosophical and literary sources that nourished the artist's evolving spiritual consciousness.Raised in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley felt at odds with life. A voracious reader, he educated himself and became enamored of the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and, particularly, of Walt Whitman. He...

Unique among American novels for its epic scope and panoramic and social sweep, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. In the novels that make up the trilogy - The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) - Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of...

"A penetrating biography. . . . Ludington offers a psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who transcended his nineteenth-century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive contribution to modernism." Kirkus Reviews"Drawing on Hartley's letters and other writings as well as on the correspondence and reminiscences of the artist's friends, Ludington traces the restless career of the painter. . . . Hartley] had troubled friendships with some of the most important artists and writers of his day Gertrude Stein, William...