Alfred Kazin, ‘Dos Passos and the Lost Generation',from On Native Grounds

Kazin sums up Dos Passos's achievement in U.S.A. in this excerpt from his study of modern American prose literature, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), 341–6, 352–9. It is interesting to compare this positive assessment of Dos Passos's work up through and including U.S.A. with Kazin's negative reactions to Dos Passos's later fiction (Nos. 45 and 54).