ABSTRACT
With The Big Money Mr. Dos Passos completes his trilogy of which The Forty-Second Paralleland Nineteen-Nineteen were the first two volumes. The special technical devices of the first volumes are continued in the third—the turning from one narrative to another and back again, the brief ‘newsreels’ breaking in to document the popular preoccupations of the passing moment, the biographical portraits of representative real persons, the ‘camera eye’ ever and again projecting the author himself full into the front of the picture as though to prove his living participation. On the whole both the handling of the material and the actual writing seem better—firmer, brisker, more masterly—in this third volume than in either of the others, the improvement being general, if perhaps most noticeable, in the biographies, which are of Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Samuel Insull, W.R.Hearst, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and F.W. Taylor, pioneer of ‘scientific management’ in industry.
