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, young and/or man:
“It seems just possible that a poem might happen
To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry—
That is a life.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.”
—Anatole France (1844–1924)
“Every young man is prone to be misled by the suggestions of his own ill-founded ambition which he mistakes for the promptings of a secret genius, and thence dreams of unrivaled greatness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him,”
—Bible: New Testament, 1 Corinthians 11:14.