Three Soldiers

Three young American soldiers in the First World War, Fuselli, a clerk from San Francisco eager for promotion, Chrisfield, a hot-tempered farm boy from Indiana, and John Andrews, a sensitive, Harvard-educated musician, are crushed in different ways by the machine of the army. Andrews, who hates its discipline, finds hope in post-war Paris in music and in love, until his desertion catches up with him.

John Dos Passos, who had served as an ambulance driver in France, published the novel in 1921, and it was one of the first American novels to show the war without glory, shocking many readers. Read his Manhattan Transfer, and compare Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.