Adventures of a Young Man

This article is about the 1939 novel. For the 1962 film, see Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man.

First edition (publ. Harcourt Brace)

Adventures of a Young Man is a 1939 novel by John Dos Passos, which eventually became the first in this writer's District of Columbia Trilogy.

The novel, which tells of a disillusioned young American radical who fights on the side of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and is killed during the war, is contemporary with Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, with its similar theme. Both books are the outcome of the 1937 visit of Dos Passos and Hemingway to Spain during which their friendship broke up in a sharp quarrel on political as well as personal grounds.

Critic George Packer in The New Yorker deplored the oblivion into which the Dos Passos book had fallen (mainly due to the rightwards political move of its author) and considered it as deserving of enduring fame as Hemingway's novel:

Hemingway’s romantic fable is in almost every way more compelling. But Dos Passos, in his dispirited and unblinking realism, was the one to convey what it meant to be alive in the nineteen-thirties.^[1]

References

↑ Stephen Koch, “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles” reviewed by George Packer

Novels by John Dos Passos

One Man's Initiation: 1917 Three Soldiers A Pushcart at the Curb Rosinante to the Road Again Streets of Night Manhattan Transfer Facing the Chair Orient Express The Ground we Stand On Chosen Country Most Likely to Succeed The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson The Men Who Made the Nation The Great Days Prospects of a Golden Age Midcentury Mr. Wilson's War Brazil on the Move The Best Times: An Informal Memoir The Shackles of Power The Portugal Story Century's Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle Easter Island: Island of Enigmas

U.S.A. trilogy	The 42nd Parallel 1919 The Big Money

District of Columbia	Adventures of a Young Man Number One The Grand Design

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