U.S.A.

U.S.A. is a trilogy consisting of three novels, The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), collected in a single volume in 1937. The work chronicles American life from the turn of the twentieth century through the late 1920s, following a dozen fictional characters whose lives occasionally intersect against the backdrop of industrialization, labor struggles, World War I, and the speculative frenzy of the Jazz Age. The narrative is interwoven with three additional modes: "Newsreel" sections that collage headlines, song lyrics, and advertising copy to evoke the public atmosphere of each era; "Camera Eye" sections that present fragmentary autobiographical impressions in stream-of-consciousness prose; and biographical portraits of real Americans, including labor leader Eugene V. Debs, industrialist Henry Ford, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Woodrow Wilson.

A prologue added for the one-volume edition presents a solitary young man walking through American streets at night, hungry for experience and work. His isolation contrasts with the speech and stories that connect Americans across the continent. The passage defines "U.S.A." as geography, institutions, and above all "the speech of the people," establishing the trilogy's ambition to capture a nation through its many voices.

The 42nd Parallel opens with Fainy McCreary, called Mac, growing up poor in Connecticut. After his mother's death, his Uncle Tim O'Hara, a socialist printer, moves the family to Chicago, where Mac learns the trade and absorbs radical ideas. When a strike allows master printers to drive Uncle Tim out of business, Mac drifts through odd jobs, eventually reaching San Francisco. He joins the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union known as the "Wobblies," and travels to Goldfield, Nevada, to publish a strike newspaper, where he hears IWW leader Big Bill Haywood speak. Letters from Maisie Spencer, a girl he left pregnant in San Francisco, pull him back. They marry and move to Los Angeles, where Maisie's materialism smothers his radicalism. After a bitter fight, Mac abandons his family and crosses into revolutionary Mexico, settling into running a bookstore with a Mexican woman named Concha. His revolutionary ideals fade into the comforts of shopkeeping.

Janey Williams grows up in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., the daughter of a former towboat captain. She idolizes her older brother Joe, who enlists in the navy and disappears from her daily life. Janey becomes an efficient stenographer, eventually hired as personal secretary to J. Ward Moorehouse, a rising public relations counsel. She devotes herself entirely to his work.

Moorehouse is the trilogy's central figure of ambition without substance. From Wilmington, Delaware, he drifts from real estate into public relations. His first marriage, to the worldly Annabelle Strang, collapses after he discovers her infidelities. His second, to Gertrude Staple, the daughter of a wealthy man, provides him with capital and social standing. He builds a career advising corporations on managing public opinion and cultivates an intimate but ostensibly platonic friendship with Eleanor Stoddard, a refined interior decorator who shares his taste for appearances. Eleanor, who grows up hating the coarseness of her stockyards-worker father, pursues social refinement with single-minded determination. She builds a decorating business with her friend Eveline Hutchins, joins the Red Cross, and follows Moorehouse to wartime France. By the time of the Paris Peace Conference, Moorehouse has positioned himself as an indispensable adviser to powerful interests.

1919 shifts to the war years. Joe Williams, Janey's brother, has deserted from the navy and works as a merchant seaman, enduring brutal conditions, torpedo attacks, and detention by British authorities. He marries Della Matthews in Norfolk, Virginia, but their relationship deteriorates. On Armistice night in St. Nazaire, France, Joe is killed in a bar fight.

Richard Ellsworth Savage, called Dick, grows up fatherless and literary, attending Harvard on a scholarship. He goes to France as a volunteer ambulance driver, where he bonds with fellow idealists over wine and disillusionment. His antiwar letters get him in trouble, but family connections secure him an officer's commission. In Paris during the Peace Conference, Dick enters Moorehouse's circle and begins an affair with Anne Elizabeth Trent, a spirited young Texan called Daughter. When she becomes pregnant, Dick refuses to marry her, focused on his career. Daughter dies in a plane crash with a French aviator named Pierre.

Eveline Hutchins, Eleanor's old friend and business partner, works in Paris during the war and becomes part of Moorehouse's social circle. She marries Paul Johnson, a well-meaning but unsophisticated soldier, partly because she is pregnant, and immediately feels trapped. Ben Compton, a Jewish radical from Brooklyn, organizes strikes and is sentenced to prison for speaking against the war, his political commitment costing him every personal relationship. The second novel concludes with "The Body of an American," a prose poem contrasting the ceremonial burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery with an anonymous young man's violent death.

The Big Money follows its characters into the boom years of the 1920s. Charley Anderson, a mechanic from North Dakota introduced briefly in the first novel, returns from France as a decorated war ace. He rises rapidly in the aviation industry, aided by stock market speculation, and marries Gladys Wheatley, a banker's daughter in Detroit. The marriage collapses into coldness, and after a plane crash that kills his mechanic and friend Bill Cermak, Charley spirals into alcohol addiction and reckless speculation. Gladys divorces him, and rivals maneuver him out of the industry. Driving drunk near Miami, he crashes his car into a train and dies in a hospital, talking deliriously about business deals.

Margo Dowling, the stepdaughter of a kindhearted woman named Agnes, endures a childhood marked by poverty and instability. Agnes's first husband, Fred Dowling, has an alcohol addiction, and her second husband, Frank Mandeville, a failed actor, molests Margo. At 16, Margo marries Tony de Garrido, a Cuban guitarist, and follows him to Havana, where their baby is born blind due to Tony's venereal disease and dies shortly after. Margo escapes to New York and works as a chorus girl. After becoming Charley Anderson's mistress in Florida, she drives to California with Agnes. In Hollywood, she catches the attention of director Sam Margolies, marries him, and begins her rise as a movie star, her identity absorbed into the machinery of the film industry.

Mary French, the daughter of a Colorado doctor who works himself to death treating miners, devotes her life to labor organizing. She works at Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago, and covers the steel strike of 1919 as a reporter in Pittsburgh. Her relationships with men are subordinated to political work; her lover Don Stevens, a Communist organizer, leaves her to marry another woman in Moscow. She throws herself into defending Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-born anarchists convicted of murder in a case widely seen as politically motivated. The novel's final character section finds Mary at a cocktail party at Eveline Johnson's apartment, surrounded by wealthy people whose world she has rejected. When news arrives that a young colleague has been killed running supplies to miners, Mary resolves to return to Pittsburgh and the struggle.

Dick Savage, meanwhile, has become Moorehouse's junior partner, managing corporate accounts and lobbying politicians. He drinks heavily and grows increasingly hollow. When Moorehouse has a heart attack, Dick takes over the firm. His literary ambitions have been entirely replaced by corporate careerism.

The trilogy ends with "Vag," a prose poem mirroring the prologue. A broke young hitchhiker stands at the roadside, watching a transcontinental airliner carry wealthy passengers overhead. The plane disappears, and the young man remains, thumb out, waiting. The final image encapsulates the trilogy's central tension between the promise of American democracy and the reality of economic inequality.