Dos Passos, John [Roderigo] (1896–1970),born in Chicago, was educated abroad and in the U.S. After graduation from Harvard (1916), he went to Spain, nominally to study architecture, but he soon entered World War I as a member of the French ambulance service, later joining the U.S. medical corps. Experiences of this period furnished the material for his first book,
One Man's Initiation—1917 (1920, reissued with a new preface as
First Encounter, 1945), a novel about an ambulance driver. This was followed by
Three Soldiers (1921), showing the effects of war on three types of character. After publishing a volume of poetry,
A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), and
Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), essays on the art and culture of Spain, he returned to fiction with
Streets of Night (1923), which has been characterized as a typical “art novel” of the time, and deals with a sensitive boy's attempt to escape from the crass conventions of his world. With
Manhattan Transfer (1925), a collective portrait in hundreds of fictional episodes of the sprawling, diversified life of New York City, Dos Passos reached maturity both in his outlook upon the world and in his stylistic technique. His next book,
Orient Express (1927), a travel diary, also shows a broadening point of view and a greater interest in social problems, as do the works collected as
Three Plays (1934);
The Garbage Man (1926), produced as
The Moon Is a Gong and dramatizing the distressed lives of a representative New York couple;
Airways, Inc. (1929), contrasting the atmosphere of big business with the oppressed lives of workers, and showing the background of a building trades strike; and
Fortune Heights (1933), showing a real‐estate development during boom times, and its ruin in the Depression.
In 1930 Dos Passos published
The 42nd Parallel, the first novel in his
U.S.A. trilogy (collected 1938), which also includes
1919 (1932) and
The Big Money (1936). These novels, which tell the story of the first three decades of the 20th century in the U.S., have as their protagonist the social background of the nation, and as their major theme the vitiation and degradation of character in a decaying civilization based on commercialism and exploitation. The trilogy employs several distinctive fictional devices. Its basis is a number of episodes from the lives of diverse characters, whose actions either converge or run parallel. The panoramic background is the “Newsreel,” a selection from contemporary headlines, advertisements, popular songs, and newspaper articles, which suggest the general atmosphere at the time of each episode. Among the narrative episodes are also interspersed brief biographies of prominent Americans of the period, whose lives form a counterpart, often ironic, of the lesser figures of the fiction. A third device is “The Camera Eye,” presenting the author's point of view toward the subject matter, through impressionistic stream‐of‐consciousness passages. The wide panorama of American life is interpreted as being marked by corruption, futility, frustration, and defeat.
This view of the contemporary world is also exhibited in a travel book of this period,
In All Countries (1934), which deals with such subjects as the Sacco‐Vanzetti case, communism in Russia, and Mexican agrarian socialism. Excerpts from this book and from his two previous travel books are combined with new material on the Spanish Civil War in
Journeys Between Wars (1938).
Adventures of a Young Man (1939), about Glenn Spotswood, a naïve, idealistic Communist, betrayed by the party when he does not follow its program, is the first of a trilogy continued in
Number One (1943), about Glenn's brother Tyler, who works for a demagogue like Huey Long, and
The Grand Design (1949), about the boy's father, a disillusioned liberal in Washington during the New Deal and World War II. The trilogy was collected as
District of Columbia (1952).
His later fiction includes
The Prospect Before Us (1950), a novel in the form of lectures on the contemporary world as Dos Passos gloomily saw it;
Chosen Country (1951), a panoramic view of the U.S. from the mid‐19th century to the Depression;
Most Likely To Succeed (1954), a novel satirizing bohemians and Communist followers between the wars;
The Great Days (1958), a novel about a former war correspondent's unhappy recollections; and
Midcentury (1961), a novel about contemporary America in which the techniques of
U.S.A. and its faith in individualism now celebrate free enterprise. Nonfiction of these years includes
The Ground We Stand On (1941), biographies of men who influenced American liberty;
Men Who Made the Nation (1957), on American leaders from the end of the Revolution to Hamilton's death; and
Prospects of a Golden Age (1959), other selected biographical sketches.
State of the Nation (1944) and
Tour of Duty (1946) describe wartime travels, while
Brazil on the Move (1963) treats travels abroad.
The Theme Is Freedom (1956) and
Occasions and Protests (1964) collect essays also representative of his later, conservative views, while
Mr. Wilson's War (1963) treats U.S. history from 1901 to 1921 from a point of view different from the liberalism of
U.S.A., the trilogy that covered the same era.
The Best Times (1966) is an informal memoir, and
The Fourteenth Chronicle (1973) collects letters and diaries.
