The book attacks the consumerism and social indifference of contemporary urban life, portraying a Manhattan that is merciless yet teeming with energy and restlessness.

The book shows some of Dos Passos' experimental writing techniques and narrative collages that would become more pronounced in his U.S.A. trilogy and other later works.

The technique in Manhattan Transfer was inspired in part by James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922), and bears frequent comparison to the experiments with film collage by Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein.

The title of the book refers to a railway station, and the way that Manhattan itself was undergoing change.

[7] David Viera has noted similarities between Manhattan Transfer and Angústia by Graciliano Ramos.