Nineteen Nineteen

The second volume of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy immerses the reader in the non-military world of the Great War era. The conflict intrudes on the fictional characters in ways that manage to be both realistic and intensified, while some of the biographies, Paxton Hibben's for example, rescue important figures from obscurity. If there was such a thing as a time machine with an all-seeing intelligence to provide commentary, it could not do much better than Nineteen Nineteen.