Manhattan Transfer

John Dos Passos’ ground breaking novel Manhattan Transfer is a landmark literary achievement. The book attacks the consumerism and social indifference of contemporary American urban life, portraying a Manhattan that is merciless yet teeming with energy, restlessness, and possibilities that too few will ultimately share. Manhattan Transfer was inspired in part by James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. In it we meet a large ensemble cast of characters who are struggling, failing, and some few succeeding in the brutally, exciting New York City of the Jazz Age.


A novel of the very first importance. The dawn of a whole new school of writing. —Sinclair Lewis

The best modern book about New York. —D. H. Lawrence

[Dos Passos] has been able to show to Europeans the America they really find when they come here. —Ernest Hemingway