Sound Recording Technology and American Literature

Abstract

As early as 1937, John Dos Passos had started thinking about the possibility of recording excerpts from his novel trilogy U.S.A. After publishing the first three volumes individually as The 42nd Parallel (1930Parallel ( ), 1919Parallel ( (1932, and The Big Money (1936), Dos Passos was negotiating with Harcourt Brace to release the trilogy as a single volume, but, like many writers in the 1930s, he worried about slumping book sales. Despite receiving critical acclaim and popular successeven landing on the August 10, 1936, cover of Time magazine -Dos Passos found that book sales had tapered considerably since the 1920s. In his correspondence with his literary agent, Bernice Baumgarten at Brandt and Brandt, Dos Passos expressed dismay that 1919 and The Big Money (published by Harcourt) never did as well as The 42nd Parallel (published by Harpers). That diminished sales had anything to do with the ongoing economic depression never seemed to cross his mind; he felt that the books simply needed better promotion. In a letter to Bernice dated October 13, 1937, he wrote, "I think that something must be done to get the contents of the book into people's heads -I mean the heads of people who haven't read it." In a follow-up letter from November 6, 1937, he asked whether C. A. Pearce of Harcourt would "want to make a phonograph record of one of the pieces in U.S.A.?" 1The idea of a promotional record was certainly novel, and even Dos Passos seemed a little tentative about its uses. "Maybe he [Pearce] could use it on a radio book hour," he suggested. At the time, the idea of adapting literature for the radio was gaining popularityjust a year earlier, for example, CBS had launched its Columbia Workshop (featuring Orson Welles), the radio program famous for its panic-inducing 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds. For Dos Passos, who disliked book tours and often