The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money (the U.S.A. trilogy) by John Dos Passos
The turn of the twentieth century is an interesting time in American history, as the public and political mind finally caught up with the reality of the industrial revolution. It is, I’m given to understand, largely a story of Labor vs. Industry, of booming growth and rising aesthetic standards that still left an awful lot of ugliness behind it. In a lot of ways, I think of this as the dawn of modern America, of modern finance and war anyway, a modern press and modern industry, modern expectations of technology development. I see a familiar mindset budding here anyway, and these books do something to capture it at the moment. The Devil in the White City is easy non-fiction, sort of airport literature, but I thought that Larson’s perspective was a clever one. U.S.A. is an ambitious American novel, one of the canon.
