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 wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 19:21,22.
Jesus to a rich young man.
“The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.”
—Anatole France (1844–1924)
“We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent—or they themselves—was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“How separate and unearthly love is,
Or women are, or what they do,
Or in our young unreal wishes
Seem to be: synthetic, new,
And natureless in ecstasies.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.”
—Paul De Man (1919–1983)