42e parallèle

The first volume of the “USA Trilogy,” 42nd Parallel conjures a new “inhuman comedy” from a world in which individual fantasies and tragedies are rooted in the despair of an entire society. Published in 1930, it was completed by 1919 and The Big Money, which appeared in the United States in 1932 and 1936 respectively.

Just as Manhattan Transfer drew attention for its stylistic innovations and its evocation of the modern city, 42nd Parallel brings us into direct contact with the harsh reality of the pre-war years and then of the war itself, in a country still shaken by an intense vital energy in which the “struggle for life” was more than a phrase: it was a necessity. Before the war, the future giant is still only a monstrous infant, its working class savagely exploited and its unions fiercely repressed. A “metropolis” on the scale of an entire country, built from dozens of portraits and characters teeming and struggling in an atmosphere worthy of the Tower of Babel.

A masterpiece of the “lost generation” avant la lettre, to be set alongside that of the “beat generation” forty years later. Dos Passos is in the street; Kerouac is on the road.

A very fine copy, as issued.