Manhattan

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was an American writer of Portuguese descent, a novelist, playwright, and essayist who became a classic of American literature during his lifetime. His unique creative style and boldness in searching for new forms earned him the... reputation of an experimental artist, and the works he created provide a unique panorama of American life at the dawn of the 20th century, characterized by its broad scope. Dos Passos' main work and peak of creativity is the monumental epic "USA." The novel "Manhattan" is one of the most important in Dos Passos' oeuvre and one of his boldest experiments. A chain of chaotically connected fates in the boiling cauldron of a determined, energetic, yet indifferent and cruel city—the matrix of all the world's megacities—creates an extraordinarily acute sense of time between the "panic of 1893," which marked the end of the "Gilded Age" of recovery from the civil war between North and South, and the colossal stock market crash of 1929 that plunged the country into the Great Depression. The roaring twenties, a time of modernization, tumultuous development, and the boldest experiments. At the time, the novel piqued the interest of Sergei Eisenstein, whose work evidently influenced Dos Passos. However, later the writer came forward with exposes of the activities of the GPU in Spain, and his works remained unavailable to Soviet readers for decades; the translator of the novel, Valentin Stenich, was shot in 1938.