Three Soldiers

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Three Soldiers is a 1921 novel by the American writer and critic John Dos Passos. It is one of the key American war novels of the First World War, and remains a classic of the realist war novel genre. H.L. Mencken, then practising primarily as an American literary critic, praised the book in the pages of the Smart Set. "Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it--and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."


John Dos Passos Novels
The Scene of Battle | One Man's Initiation: 1917 | Three Soldiers | A Pushcart at the Curb | Rosinante to the Road Again | Streets of Night | Manhattan Transfer | Facing the Chair | Orient Express | The Ground we Stand On | Chosen Country | Most Likely to Succeed | The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson | The Men Who Made the Nation | The Great Days | Prospects of a Golden Age | Midcentury | Mr. Wilson's War | Brazil on the Move | The Best Times: An Informal Memoir | The Shackles of Power | The Portugal Story | Century's Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle | Easter Island: Island of Enigmas
U.S.A. Trilogy: The 42nd Parallel | Nineteen Nineteen | The Big Money
District of Columbia: Adventures of a Young Man | Number One | The Grand Design