Manhattan Transfer

John Dos Passos published this novel in 1925, and it reads like the city it portrays: crowded, fragmentary, always in motion. Rather than follow one hero, it cuts between dozens of New Yorkers, from a stage actress and a failing lawyer to immigrants, drunks, and drifters, tracing their tangled lives from the turn of the century into the Jazz Age. Dos Passos borrowed the montage and stream of consciousness of Joyce and Eliot to catch the noise, the headlines, and the rhythm of the modern metropolis. The effect is a portrait in which the city itself becomes the real protagonist, dazzling and pitiless. It anticipated the technique he would expand in his U.S.A. trilogy. A free PDF and EPUB edition are available to download.