ABSTRACT
The word was going around that King Vidor had drawn the film from Manhattan Transfer. And of Manhattan Transfer they were reporting great wonders as the most original and most profound book written in America in those years. King Vidor had done one thing and Dos Passos quite another. Nor does the question lie in the matter of "tone"—cinematographic tone or novelistic tone. In short, the work is not only not that tragic everyday epic of all New York which Dos Passos thought it was, but it doesn't even get beyond being a heap of picturesque fragments. Dos Passos has a way all his own of narrating the biographies: he begins at the birth, or about that time, and never leaves empty a single day of his protagonist; sometimes he condenses—"in that month", "in that year"—but nothing is ever passed over in silence.
