The Story Archive

Manhattan Transfer

John Dos Passos · 1925 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Modernist

New York from the 1890s to Prohibition, carried by a few dozen lives that cross and lose each other — Ellen Thatcher, an actress climbing; Jimmy Herf, a newspaperman losing the appetite for it; a farm boy off the ferry asking the way to the centre of things; a French sailor who turns bootlegger. Sections open with headlines, song scraps and prose-poem overtures, and a character can vanish for a hundred pages and reappear ruined or rich. The method worked out here is the one Dos Passos then ran across three volumes and thirty years.

Open Manhattan Transfer in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Lineage

Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalPolitical
Theme
The American DreamWealth & GreedIsolation & AlienationClass & InequalityIdentity & Self
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
EverymanWanderer
Plot structure
PolyphonicNonlinear / FracturedEpisodic
Symbol / motif
The CityThe MachineThe Ship / Boat
Conflict
vs Societyvs Self
Mode / tone
ModernistRealistIronic
Culture / tradition
Modern / American

Closest analogues