Three Soldiers

New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Good. 8x4x1. First edition, first state (three blank integral leaves following front endpaper, 'signing' for 'singing' on p. 213 line 31). Includes scarce jacket. Front hinge just beginning to weaken, light ring stain and a few minor blemishes on boards, loss from jacket spine ends, jacket spine faded. 1921 Hard Cover. ix, 471 pp. A classic novel depicting World War I from an American realist perspective. Dos Passos also wrote Manhattan Transfer, and is perhaps best known for his U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel; 1919; The Big Money), which Modern Library ranked 23rd of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. H.L. Mencken wrote of it: "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.