Close Reading and the American Dream: Janey meets J. Ward Moorehouse for the first time Anonymous College

“Immediately she saw him Janey thought he must be a fine man.”

This quote is from The 42nd parallel written by John Dos Passos in 1930. It is the first volume of the U.S.A trilogy which also includes 1919 and The Big Money. John Dos Passos is an American novelist and painter who was born in 1896 and died in 1970. He is often described as a modernist writer because he experiments and uses new and different techniques of writing: in The 42nd parallel, there are four different narratives modes. The first one and the most traditional one ais the stories of five fictional characters, then we have the Newsreels which includes pieces of newspapers and song lyrics. We also have the Camera Eye which are pieces of John Dos Passos's life and the last one is the biography of famous self made men.

The extract we are studying today is from The 42nd Parallel and tells the story of Janey, a young stenographer whose dream is to be a self made woman. The extract takes place in 1916, after Janey quit her previous job and was called by M. Barrow to be his stenographer for a few days. Here, she will be the stenographer for a meeting between M. Barrow, a bald-headed man and J.Ward Moorehouse, an important and powerful self made man. This is the...