Big Money, The

Big Money, The, novel by Dos Passos, published in 1936. It is the last of the trilogy U.S.A. (collected 1938), following The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932). Interspersed in the narrative are brief biographies of Frederick Taylor, Ford, Veblen, Isadora Duncan, the Wright brothers, Valentino, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hearst, and Samuel Insull.

The war hero Charley Anderson returns to New York to organize an airplane factory, intending to produce better planes and avoid the profit motive. Progressively disillusioned, he joins a large Detroit plane factory, marries the heiress Gladys Wheatley, takes to drink, gambles in the stock market, and is swindled by his associates. In Florida to recuperate, he has an affair with Margo Dowling, is divorced by Gladys, enters a fraudulent land deal, and is killed in an automobile accident.

Margo, after an unhappy childhood, goes to New York, hopes to have a stage career, is seduced by her stepfather, and elopes with a Cuban dancer. Deserted by her husband, she becomes a New York chorus girl, drifts to Miami, and after her affair with Charley uses the last of his money to go to Hollywood. There she marries a producer, has a brief success in motion pictures, and sinks into obscurity.

Mary French, daughter of a Colorado doctor, attends Vassar, works on a Pittsburgh paper, and is discharged for her sympathetic reporting of a steel strike. She lives for a time with the dishonest labor leader G.H. Barrow, but leaves him to do union work and aid her Communist lover Ben Compton. Disillusioned by Ben's arrest, the loss of another lover, and the outcome of the Sacco‐Vanzetti case, she temporarily quits these activities, but later plunges again into labor work.

Richard Ellsworth Savage is alone able to cope with the era, accepting its standards and opportunistically serving the “public relations” firm of J.W. Moorehouse, whose successor he promises to become.

The final character is a “vag,” hitchhiking across the continent, who thinks of the comfort of the passengers in a plane overhead, and of his youthful beliefs: “went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your own home, shine bigger than your neighbor….”