Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos (Hardback)

Donald Pizer is not only a consistently reliable guide to the literature of John Dos Passos, he offers an unmatched depth of critical understanding. Pizer digs to the heart of the matter, focusing squarely on Dos Passos and his world, too sure of himself and his method to need flourishes of this year's critical theory for support. This volume shows Pizer at this best, shining the brightest light on his subject. -- Richard Layman, President, Bruccoli Clark Layman, and Editor Director, The Dictionary of Literary Biography
Pizer is one of the best known-and admired-scholars of Dos Passos's work. Toward a Modernist Style is a series of intelligent essays about this major American writer. It is not exactly a reassessment of Dos Passos's work, but it adds to our understanding and expands our view of him as a modernist writer. If I were a student or scholar studying Dos Passos, or twentieth-century American literature and culture, I would want to read this. -- Townsend Ludington, Boshamer Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, author of John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey
Pizer's new collection complements and expands the scope of the scholar's earlier work on Dos Passos's most important novels and their radical innovations in narrative form. These insightful essays place the writer's work-writing and painting-into interdisciplinary contexts and connect it to the intellectual and cultural ferment of the 1920s and the expatriate community in which Dos Passos played an integral role as a leading modernist. -- Lisa Nanney, author of John Dos Passos Revisited