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:
“No young man ever thinks he shall die.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.”
—Anatole France (1844–1924)
“We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)
““How old is she, Billy boy, Billy boy?
How old is she, charming Billy?”
Past six, past seven,
Past twenty and eleven,
She’s a young thing, and cannot leave her mother.””
—Unknown. Billy Boy (l. 21–25)
“Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known, than their crimes; and, if you hint to a man that you think him silly, ignorant or even ill-bred or awkward, he will hate you more and longer than it you tell him plainly that you think him a rogue.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)