Manhattan Transfer: The American Novel as Scrapbook Essay by Ted Gioia

John Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer is perhaps best remembered nowadays as a trial run for this same author's U.S.A. Trilogy, a massive 1,200-page work that would take up most of Dos Passos’s attention over the next decade. Most of the quirky ingredients that characterize Manhattan Transfer—the fragmented narratives, the bits of newspaper st…