{{Short description|1921 novel by John Dos Passos}} {{italic title}} {{hatnote group| {{For|the statue|Three Soldiers (statue)}} {{Distinguish|Soldiers Three}} }} {{Use mdy dates|date=March 2025}} thumb|First edition|right '''''Three Soldiers''''' is a 1921<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.eldritchpress.org/wwone/threes.html|title=Main Page - ArticleWorld|website=Eldritchpress.org|accessdate=14 July 2018}}</ref> novel by American writer and critic John Dos Passos. It is one of the American war novels of the First World War, and remains a classic of the realist war novel genre.

==Background==

H. L. Mencken praised the book in the pages of ''The Smart Set'': <blockquote>"Until ''Three Soldiers'' is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it—and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."<ref>Henry Louis Mencken, "Portrait of an American Citizen," ''Smart Set'', 69 (October 1922) 140-2, in ''Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews'', ed. Margaret Anne O'Conner, Cambridge UP, 2001 (141–143)</ref></blockquote>

==References== {{Reflist}}

==External links== * [http://www.johndospassos.com/three-soldiers/ ''Three Soldiers'' Webpage], Official John Dos Passos Website (est. Oct. 2013 by the Dos Passos Family) * {{Gutenberg|no=6362 |name=Three Soldiers}} * {{librivox book | title=Three Soldiers | author=John Dos PASSOS}}

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Category:1921 American novels Category:Anti-war novels Category:George H. Doran Company books Category:Novels set during World War I

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