Three Soldiers

By John Dos Passos and Townsend Ludington

Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence, and the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine on ordinary soldiers.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Dec 1, 1997
• ISBN: 9781440674372

John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was a writer, painter, and political activist. His service as an ambulance driver in Europe at the end of World War I led him to write Three Soldiers in 1919, the first in a series of works that established him as one of the most prolific, inventive, and influential American writers of the twentieth century, writing over forty books, including plays, poetry, novels, biographies, histories, and memoirs. 

Reviews for Three Soldiers

[m.belljackson · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Dos Passos presents the varied backgrounds of his Three Soldiers and their early driving concerns: get to the front, get promoted to Corporal, andsurvive the battles, then follows only John Andrews as he attempts to write music, then deserts the Army.His personality evolves from anti-war and hatred of the Army to becoming a pretentious, tiresome, self-centered and selfish individual who careslittle about other people's feelings or his impact on their lives. Worse still, he proceeds to confound his friends and us with a sequence of stupiddecisions like traveling without required papers, dog tags, or a pass, all of which he has or can easily get. His choices lead to a really dumb conclusion.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Author John Dos Passos came out of World War I believing that socialism and pacifism offered the world a better way forward. He finished writing Three Soldiers in the spring of 1919, but the novel was not published until 1921. Interestingly, the 1932 Modern Library edition of the novel that I read includes an introduction dated June 1932 in which Dos Passos laments the fact that he did not “work over” the novel much more than he did before it was first published in 1921. It is obvious from the introduction that the author was a disillusioned man in 1932 but that he had not given up on changing the politics of the average American. According to him:“…we can at least meet events with our minds cleared of some of the romantic garbage that kept us from doing clear work then. Those of us who have lived through have seen these years strip the bunting off the great illusions of our time, we must deal with the raw structure of history now, we must deal with it quick, before it stamps us out.”Three Soldiers follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has read even a few war novels, be those stories about WWI, WWII, or the wars in Viet Nam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We first meet the main characters as civilians and then follow them through their military basic training, their deployment to the field, into battle, and finally, to the aftermath of their combat experiences. While Dos Passos did take this approach in Three Soldiers, there are strikingly few pages dedicated to actual battle descriptions and the like. Instead, the author focuses more on what happens to soldiers when combat ends by showing his main characters as they recuperate from their wounds in war zone hospitals. In that way, it is easy for Dos Passos to contrast the disillusioned, sometimes physically and emotionally crippled, soldiers there to the patriotic, ambitious boys they were when they eagerly joined the army to serve their country. This is not an easy novel to read, mainly because each new chapter seems to open with long, dreary descriptions of the cold, wet days that the soldiers wake up to every morning. Those descriptions help set the tone for the mental state of the author’s three soldiers (although the bulk of the novel is really about only one of them) as they finally figure out how naïve they have been about how the system really works. Rather than winning promotions and pay increases, they find themselves doing menial tasks and reporting to men who simply gamed the military system better than them. They get bored – and the reader starts getting bored with and for them. Perhaps that is what Dos Passos was aiming for; if so it works beautifully.Bottom Line: Even to its last two pages, Three Soldiers is one of the most depressing war novels I’ve ever read. The argument that Dos Passos makes for socialism and pacificism is clear enough, but because the author sees everything in such black and white terms, he does not, in the long run, build a very effective case for either.Bonus Observation: This Dos Passos quote from the 1932 introduction could have easily been written last week:“Certainly eighty percent of the inhabitants of the United States must read a column of print a day, if it’s only in the tabloids and the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Somehow, just as machinemade shoes aren’t as good as handmade shoes, the enormous quantity produced has resulted in diminished power in books. We’re not men enough to run the machines we’ve made.”I can only imagine what Dos Passos would think if he were alive today when all of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of books at our electronic fingertips twenty-four hours a day?

[figre · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My guess is that the impact of anti-war books, that is anti-war books from a number of years ago, has diminished because of the volumes and volumes of such books that have been published over the years. Therefore, the impact of such a book as Three Soldiers is probably not as profound as it was when first published, coming out not too long after the First World War and with the US still fervently believing that armed conflict was the solution to so many of its problems.But today, after so many classics have been issued, this becomes an interesting story of soldiers fighting in WWI (actually, primarily focused on after the war is over but before being sent home), but not the profoundly moving anti-war story it was at one time.Don’t get me wrong; still a good novel. Starting with training before the war, the three soldiers of the title are introduced. However, the story doesn’t exactly follow the three of them through their voyages, but rather visits them at different points in their travels – shifting focus between them at various times. Of interest, there is very little focus on the actual battles (as one might expect in an anti-war novel). Instead, after the training we see them as they prepare for battle. Then the majority of the novel is taken up with post-war France – primarily after the Armistice.A different telling of a story than you might expect, which is why this novel is more interesting than it might have been (particularly, as I’ve already mentioned, with the fact that it is not as shockingly anti-war as it was in the past.) Interesting character studies, and a frank portrayal of those characters in a bad time. A book worth reading for all of these things, and in spite of what it used to be.

[michaelbartley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a interesting war novel, very little about war itself a lot about bing in the army. lot to think about about choices we make thoughtful novel

[bruderbane · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“Three Soldiers” by John Dos Passos is considered a literary classic published soon after World War I and encapsulating much of the disgruntled war fatigue many felt during and after the war. What I discovered was a rather piecemeal lethargic march through the lives of self-centered egocentric snobs not men who had been through the meat-grinder and had become rightly disenchanted and disgruntled. Mr. Passos did not enthrall or entice me and while the writing was quite descriptive the shear lack of character direction, which I do understand was purposeful and reminiscent of the era, encouraged me to put the novel down earlier than I would have liked.