Three Soldiers

The first great American novel of World War I. They come to the army from different Americas: Fuselli, a San Francisco store clerk bucking for promotion; Chrisfield, a laid-back Indiana farm boy; and Andrews, a Harvard graduate and promising New York City musician. In basic training, they are told it doesn't matter where a man is born or what he wants to be. The best soldiers are automatons. To be a perfect cog within a vast military machine is all his country asks of him. In the muddy fields and trenches of France, they learn the terrible meaning of their sacrifice: Once lost, a soldier's humanity can never be regained. Based on John Dos Passos's firsthand knowledge of the Great War, Three Soldiers is a grim and utterly realistic portrait of army life. A modernist masterpiece and a brave statement of fact in a time of sentiment, it set a standard that Hemingway, Jones, Mailer, O'Brien, and every other chronicler of the American war experience has since tried to match.