Adventures of a Young Man is a 1939 novel by John Dos Passos, which eventually became the first in this writer's District of Columbia Trilogy.
The novel, which tells of a disillusioned young American radical who fights on the side of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and is killed during the war, is contemporary with Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, with its similar theme. Both books are the outcome of the 1937 visit of Dos Passos and Hemingway to Spain during which their friendship broke up in a sharp quarrel on political as well as personal grounds.
Critic George Packer in The New Yorker deplored the oblivion into which the Dos Passos book had fallen (mainly due to the rightwards political move of its author) and considered it as deserving of enduring fame as Hemingway's novel:
Hemingway’s romantic fable is in almost every way more compelling. But Dos Passos, in his dispirited and unblinking realism, was the one to convey what it meant to be alive in the nineteen-thirties.
Famous quotes containing the words young man, adventures of, adventures, young and/or man:
“Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“I have a vast deal to say, and shall give all this morning to my pen. As to my plan of writing every evening the adventures of the day, I find it impracticable; for the diversions here are so very late, that if I begin my letters after them, I could not go to bed at all.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.”
—Anatole France (1844–1924)
“A young fellow ought to be wiser than he should seem to be; and an old fellow ought to seem wise whether he really be so or not.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)