 | This articlerelies largely or entirely on asingle source. Relevant discussion may be found on thetalk page. Please helpimprove this article byintroducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Adventures of a Young Man" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(August 2024) |
Adventures of a Young Man is a 1939 novel byJohn Dos Passos, which eventually became the first in this writer's District of Columbia Trilogy.
The novel, which tells of a disillusioned youngAmerican radical who fights on the side of theSecond Spanish Republic during theSpanish Civil War and is killed during the war, is contemporary withErnest Hemingway'sFor Whom the Bell Tolls, with its similar theme. Both books are the outcome of the 1937 visit of Dos Passos and Hemingway to Spain during which their friendship broke up in a sharp quarrel on political as well as personal grounds.
CriticGeorge Packer inThe New Yorker deplored the oblivion into which the Dos Passos book had fallen (mainly due to the rightwards political move of its author) and considered it as deserving of enduring fame as Hemingway's novel: "Hemingway’s romantic fable is in almost every way more compelling. But Dos Passos, in his dispirited and unblinking realism, was the one to convey what it meant to be alive in the nineteen-thirties".[1]
 | This article about awar novel of the 1930s is astub. You can help Wikipedia byexpanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article'stalk page. |