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:
“If you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. This sum may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“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)
“A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man remembers—his hopes.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)