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:
“There was a young man of Madras
Who had a magnificent ass:
Not rounded and pink,
As you probably think—
It was grey, had long ears, and ate grass.”
—Anonymous.
“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)
“There’ll be that crowd, that barbarous crowd, through all the centuries,
And who can say but some young belle may walk and talk men wild
Who is my beauty’s equal, though that my heart denies,
But not the exact likeness, the simplicity of a child,
And that proud look as though she had gazed into the burning sun....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man is so much to be desired.... The leg is the best part of the figure ... and the best leg is the man’s.... Man should no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid.”
—Alice Meynell (1847–1922)