Nineteen Nineteen

U.S.A., widely known as one of the classics of the lost generation of the 1920's and 1930's, is particularly significant at this time when another generation is faced with the problems of disillusionment and unrest that follow a great war.

Alred Kazin has said of this book: 'Technically, U.S.A. is one of the great achievements of the modern novel, yet the book lives by its narrative style, the wonderfully concrete yet elliptical prose which bears along and winds around the life stories in the book like a conveyor belt carrying Americans through some vast Ford plant of the human spirit. U.S.A. is a national epic, the first great national epic of its kind in the modern American novel... But the great thing about U.S.A. is that though it sweeps up so many human lives together and intones their waste and illusion and defeat so steadily, we seem to be swept along with them, and to see each life perfectly at the moment it passes by us.'

Called one of the saddest novels ever written by an American, it is also 'as vigorous and sweeping a panorama of twentieth century America as has ever been done in fiction.' It is 'the actual living, breathing record of a period in its most intense manifestation.'