Streets of Night

He came to Harvard for truth. He found only the shadows of respectability.

John Dos Passos's early novel is a haunting portrait of youthful disillusionment, set against the gilded, narrow streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1900s. Published in 1923, it follows a young man's struggle to escape the suffocating expectations of his social class and find something resembling an authentic self.

Fanshaw is a Harvard student, intelligent and sensitive, but trapped. He is caught between the world he was born into—a world of privilege, obligation, and polite conversation—and the world he secretly desires—a world of feeling, spontaneity, and dangerous honesty. His friend Cham, more cynical and worldly, drags him into a double date with two chorus girls, Phoebe and her friend. A day of canoeing and picnicking should be innocent, but for Fanshaw, it becomes a crisis. He is disgusted by his own desires, terrified of the judgment of his peers, and painfully aware that the "respectability" he has been taught to value is a cage, not a shelter.

The novel traces his relationship with women—particularly the elusive and tragic Nancibel Taylor—and his friendship with the doomed David Wendell, as he tries to reconcile the passion he feels with the paralysis of his environment . The city of Boston itself, with its streets of night and its rigid Puritan conscience, becomes a character, pressing down on him from every side.

This is Dos Passos at his most introspective and lyrical: a novel about the failure of the individual in a materialistic society, the tension between tradition and modernity, and the quiet desperation of the young who sense they were born into the wrong world. Streets of Night is an overlooked early work, but one that contains the seeds of the great modernist experiments to come—Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy.

• Published in 1923, Dos Passos's third novel, following One Man's Initiation and Three Soldiers

• Explores themes of class, sexuality, disillusionment, and the suffocating weight of social expectation

• An essential early work for understanding the development of one of America's most innovative modernist writers

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A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the brightest campuses can cast the darkest shadows.

About the Author

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was a prominent American novelist, artist, and political thinker, best known for his U.S.A. trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—a groundbreaking work of modernist fiction that employed experimental narrative techniques to depict the complexities of early twentieth-century American life. Born in Chicago, he graduated from Harvard University in 1916, an experience that deeply shaped the setting and themes of Streets of Night. He was one of the first American authors to use the stream-of-consciousness technique, blending historical artifacts with fictional characters to create a new kind of realism. His famous works include Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy. He died in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1970.