Manhattan at Last!
Reviewed by Sinclair Lewis
The Saturday Review of Literature
December 5, 1925
Just to rub it in, I regard “Manhattan Transfer” as more important in every way than any thing by Gertrude Stein or Marcel Proust or even the great white boar, Mr. Joyce’s “Ulysses .” For Mr. Dos Passos can use, and deftly does use, all their experimental psychology and style, all their revolt against the molds of classic fiction. But the difference! Dos Passos is interesting! Their novels are treatises on harmony, very scholarly, and confoundedly dull; “Manhattan Transfer” is the moving symphony itself.
Source: HathiTrust
John Dos Passos Notes the Tragic Trivia of New York
Review by Henry Longan Stewart
The New York Times, November 29, 1925
A TIME seems to arrive in the career of nearly all of our writers of the younger school when the challenge of New York to their imagination and descriptive powers assumes the proportions of a clear duty that may no longer be shirked if self-respect is to be maintained… John Dos Passos in “Manhattan Transfer” has made the attempt with more obvious intent and more consciously than any prose writer hitherto.
Source: The New York Times
Review by D. H. Lawrence
1927 review reprinted in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence.
To me, it is the best modern book about New York that I have read. It is an endless series of glimpses of people in the vast scuffle of Manhattan Island, as they turn up again and again and again, in a confusion that has no obvious rhythm, but wherein at last we recognize the systole-diastole of success and failure, the end being all failure, from the point of view of life; and then another flight towards another nowhere.
Source: Internet Archive
