"A MAJOR AND GROUNDBREAKING WORK OF AMERICAN FICTION": FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING, OF JOHN DOS PASSOS' THREE SOLDIERS IN RARE FIRST ISSUE DUST JACKET

DOS PASSOS, John. Three Soldiers. New York: George H. Doran, (1921). Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition, first printing, of Dos Passos' controversial WWI work, one of America's greatest war novels, anticipating "by eight years the story that Hemingway would tell in Farewell to Arms," in first issue dust jacket.

Based on his experience as a WWI ambulance driver, "Three Soldiers heralded a number of later American war novels… cummings' Enormous Room (1922) and Hemingway's Sun Also Rises (1926) and Farewell to Arms (1929)"—to name but a few. On publication it "immediately stirred up a hornet's nest… and Dos Passos was well launched on a career that was to include such masterworks of 20th-century fiction as Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1938). And over the years… Three Soldiers assumed its permanent place as a major and groundbreaking work of American fiction" (Pizer, Toward a Modernist Style). "Not since Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895) had an American novel stirred such heated debate" (Maine, John Dos Passos). The New York Times swiftly attacked it as "a nationwide insult," while the New York Evening Post called it the first American war novel "written with sufficient passion and vividness of detail to count as literature." Dos Passos "may have anticipated by eight years the story that Hemingway would tell in Farewell to Arms… but the strength of the novel lay in the sense it gave of war as a mass experience, which is why Mailer may have made it the model for Naked and the Dead…Long before all the talk of nonfiction novels, Dos Passos broke the ground" (New York Times). First printing with no publisher's colophon on title page, pages 9-10 on integral leaf (later printings tipped onto pages 11-12), containing "three blank integral leaves at front, none in back, endpapers front and back; and 'signing' at 213.31" (Bruccoli & Clark, 100). First state dust jacket with publisher's blurb on spine, front and back; quote from Chicago Tribune as last item on front flap. Tiny bookseller notation to rear free endpaper.

Book fine; slight edge-wear, early archival tape reinforcement at spine ends to verso of very good dust jacket.