Editor Lynn has contributed an excellent introduction to this selection of the works of John Dos Passos who for almost fifty years has caught ""both a continent and a century in the camera eye of his fiction""-- a leviathan lifetime work. There are extensive excerpts from his paradigm World War I novel, Three Soldiers; from his prototypical demagogue, Number One; from Most likely to Succeed which bitterly indicted the left-wing infighting of the '30's; and from the works which were a composite portrait of national experience, Manhattan Transfer, U.S.A., and Midcentury. Although Dos Passos has been faulted for the obtrusiveness of his opinions, for the slackness of his documentary style, his work has been both representative and significant and no one has questioned its essential sincerity, indignation and ""formidable independence.