THE CRITICAL decade which followed the World War saw,
in the United States as in other countries, many novelists
bent on showing how unheroic the conflict had been, how
cruel, wasteful, stupid. The most popular American war play,
What Price Glory ( 1924) by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings
, exhibited its marines as cheerful rowdies rather than
crusaders, and created in the wrangling Flagg and Quirt the
best known characters of American fiction surviving from
the war. The war novels were likely to be less boisterous, more
reflective. After Upton Sinclair 100% ( 1920), with its
ironical arraignment of war-time civilians, came John Dos Passos's
Three Soldiers ( 1921), with its hard account of the
effect of the army on the enlisted men; and E. E. Cumming
The Enormous Room ( 1922), which though not a novel
has been read largely as one, with its biting narrative of unjust
imprisonment in France. The Enormous Room is the most
brilliant, permanent, and important of all these, but it was
the work of a poet who wrote nothing else of anything like its
kind. Three Soldiers established a new novelist in a distinctive
career.

John Dos Passos ( 1896- ), born in Chicago of a Portu-
guese-American father and a Virginia mother, went from
Harvard at twenty to study in Spain but, like Cummings,
joined an ambulance service in France and saw war at first
hand. His One Man's Initiation ( 1919) was a semi-auto-
biographical story of a young dilettante who drives an am-
bulance and admires cathedrals. Three Soldiers took another
dilettante, this time a musician, through his war experiences,

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