Three Soldiers
By John Dos Passos
Prepared by the Virginia M. Woolf Foundation
In Extra Large Print
Genre: Historic Fiction - First World War
Reviewed by Harry S. Chou - March 28, 2011
Three Soldiers is a soul-searing novel, by John Dos Passos (1896-1970). This novel was based upon his personal experiences in France and Italy during World War One. The American born Dos Passos was a highly educated and literary young man who counted among his friends, the poets E. E. Cummings and Robert Hillyer, with whom he volunteered to act as an ambulance driver during the war. Dos Passos volunteered for service in July of 1917, well before America entered the war. In 1918, after America had entered the war, Dos Passos transferred to the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
Dos Passos began writing his first novel during the war, and had his first novel published in 1920. However, it was his second novel, Three Soldiers, which first brought him literary acclaim. This is a strong, anti-war novel that attempts to expose the horrors of war from the viewpoint of the common enlisted man.
The story is told from the viewpoint of three soldiers, men from different economic and social strata. Each witnesses unimaginable horrors, is forced to engage in acts that they never thought they could bring themselves to do, and each is harassed by the military hierarchy and bureaucracy. This last component will resonate with anyone who has served as an enlisted man (or woman) in any branch of the service, at any period of time!
In this day and age, Three Soldiers is often ignored in favor of more 'commercially' successful novels such that of his friend, Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms. Nonetheless this is an important, realist portrayal of war, and a literary masterpiece crafted by one of America's unsung literary geniuses. It should be noted that this novel has also been compared favorably to The Red Badge of Courage, as a powerful portrayal of the wartime experience of the common man.
This extra large print edition of Three Soldiers was prepared by the Virginia M. Woolf Foundation. This is a non-profit organization that reformats books in extra large print (a process that is also known as Text-Key), and makes them available to those who cannot read standard print. If you purchase this downloadable ebook from the Virginia M. Woolf Foundation, you will receive three copies - a text version that is ideal for use with a screen reader as well as two preformatted versions, one in a 28-point font and the other in a 48-point font that can be read on your computer with the free, Adobe Reader program. The PDF files have been formatted so that you can easily navigate through the book, with the pages fitting nicely into your computer's window, so that you don't have to scroll down the screen to read a given page. If you need a smaller or large font, you can alter the font size using the Adobe Reader, but the end result, while still readable may not be as perfectly formatted as the preset sizes.
You can learn more about the Virginia M. Woolf Foundation on their website, located at: www.extralargeprint.org.
Three Soldiers is one of more than fifty books that have been added to the Virginia M. Woolf Foundation's list of publications, so far this year! Other new titles include:
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Steig Larsson
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke
U is for Undertow, by Sue Grafton
and many more, check out Virginia M. Woolf Foundation's Library of available books! Currently, most of their books sell for $2.99, with only a handful that are priced higher.
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