A New Historicist Reading of John Dos Passos’ Novel The Big Money: Depiction of Children as a “Second Lost Generation”

Abstract

This article examines the representation of children as a “second lost generation” in John Dos Passos’ novel The Big Money. It explains that the documentary and narrative sections that Dos Passos integrates into the novel explore how children’s position in the 1930s is caught between parents’ care and indifference. Dos Passos clarifies the impact of the American Dream and materialism upon the structuring of this conflicted position. In the novel’s Newsreels, Dos Passos presents a composite of popular songs and news headlines that present children seeking jobs and also departing from their family houses. Alongside the presentation of this phenomenon which resonates with children’s social situation in 1930s, in the narrative sections Dos Passos portrays Juvenile characters as living in families whose main concern is the making of money. To investigate this representation, the article considers the views of historians about the first “lost generation” (the post-World War I generation). It utilizes the “second lost generation” term to describe the juveniles who struggled during the 1930s age of Depression. The article historicizes the position of children in 1930s America. It refers to literary critics’ views about Dos Passos’ modernist and political inclination. The article concludes that Dos Passos’ The Big Money manifests in a modernist form fragmented historical realities about 1930s America’s materialistic thinking, within which children are seen as a second “lost generation”.