John Dos Passos

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John Dos Passos. (credit: Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.)

(born Jan. 14, 1896, Chicago, Ill., U.S. — died Sept. 28, 1970, Baltimore, Md.) U.S. writer. Son of a wealthy lawyer, Dos Passos attended Harvard University. His wartime service as an ambulance driver and later work as a journalist led him to see the U.S. as "two nations," one for the rich and one for the poor. His reputation as social historian, radical critic of American life, and major novelist of the postwar "lost generation" rests primarily on his powerful U.S.A. trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).

For more information on John Roderigo Dos Passos, visit Britannica.com.

The reputation of the American novelist John Roderigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) is based chiefly on his early work, especially the trilogy "U.S.A."

John Dos Passos was born in Chicago on Jan. 14, 1896, the illegitimate son of a noted New York lawyer, John Randolph Dos Passos, and a wealthy Virginian, Lucy Addison Sprigg. His father did not acknowledge paternity until a year before his death, when the young Dos Passos was 20. As a boy, Dos Passos lived principally on the Virginia farm of his mother's family, and he also traveled frequently with his mother to Mexico, Belgium, and England.

Dos Passos attended Choate School under the name John Roderigo Madison. He graduated from Harvard in 1916, meanwhile publishing stories, verse, and reviews in the Harvard Monthly.

In 1917 Dos Passos was in Spain, studying Spanish culture. During World War I he enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Unit and served in Spain and Italy. In 1918 he became a private in the U.S. Medical Corps, serving in France. Demobilized in 1919, he remained in Europe to finish two novels: One Man's Initiation - 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). During the 1920s Dos Passos worked as a newspaper correspondent and traveled extensively but, as an increasingly successful author, he lived chiefly in New York.

First Novels

One Man's Initiation - 1917, based on Dos Passos' experiences as an ambulance corpsman, is poignantly antiwar. It also foreshadows a more pervasive theme of his work: contemporary technological society's crippling effects on its inhabitants.

Dos Passos' first significant novel, Three Soldiers, is a bitterly ironic commentary on the professed ideals for which World War I was fought and, more deeply, on the "values" by which modern, mechanized man lives. Dos Passos sees the real enemy as the army itself, which by exacerbating the ordinary weaknesses and inner conflicts of its members causes irreparable harm. His three major characters are entirely broken by army life. Three Soldiers is part of an anti-World War I literary tradition that includes works by Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves, E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, and Erich Maria Remarque.

Literary Experiment

Manhattan Transfer (1925) is Dos Passos' first major experimental novel. Set in New York, it is a panoramic view of the frustrations and defeats of contemporary urban life. Frequently shifting focus among its marginally related characters, the novel details an oppressive picture of human calamity and defeat; fires, accidents, brawls, crimes, and suicides abound, and unhappiness is pervasive. The novel is uneven; it is contrived in its plotting and confusing in its use of time but interesting and especially noteworthy for its development of formal devices that would be better employed in U.S.A.

Dos Passos' 1920s output also included a volume of free verse, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922); two impressionistic travel books, Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) and Orient Express (1927); a novel, Streets of Night (1923); two plays; and a tract in defense of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, Facing the Chair (1927).

Politics and Reportage

The political implications of Dos Passos' early writings are clearly socialist, and in 1926 he helped found the New Masses, a Marxist political and cultural journal, to which he contributed until the early 1930s. In 1927 he was jailed in Boston for picketing on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1928 he visited the Soviet Union. Returning to the United States in 1929, he married Katherine F. Smith.

As a political reporter for the New Republic and other journals during the early 1930s, Dos Passos covered labor flareups, political conventions, the Depression, and the New Deal. His fundamental distrust of organized society extended to organizations as well, and despite his sympathy with many Communist causes he was always a maverick rather than a party radical. In 1934 an overt rift developed between Dos Passos and the Communist movement, and it marked the beginning of a long shift to the right in his political sympathies.

After a one-man show of his sketches in 1937, Dos Passos went to Spain to help Hemingway and Joris Ivens make a film documentary of the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Earth. Dos Passos and Hemingway, who had earlier survived an auto accident together, were good friends until Dos Passos' sympathies with the anarchist faction estranged Hemingway, who was partial to the main Loyalist forces.

In 1940 Dos Passos became active in behalf of political refugees, and during World War II did a good deal of war writing, principally for Harper's and Life magazines, for whom he later covered the postwar Nuremberg trials.

Major Work

U.S.A. (1937), Dos Passos' masterpiece, is a trilogy made up of The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen-Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936). To solve the time problem that flawed Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos employed three unusual devices: "The Camera Eye," autobiographical episodes rendered in a Joycean stream of consciousness; "Newsreel," a Dada-like pastiche of mass culture, combining fragments of pop songs, newspaper headlines, and political speeches; and short biographies, impressionistic sketches of some of the prominent figures of the 1900-1930 time span - Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Thomas A. Edison, Charles Steinmetz, and others. These sections serve as time guides and also as markers separating the narrative chapters that constitute the bulk of the trilogy and are concerned with a cross section of American social types. Among these are Mac McCreary, a poor boy who grows to a class consciousness and revolutionary commitment so strong that he deserts his family to serve the revolution in Mexico; Eleanor Stoddard, a New York interior decorator, whose gentility and estheticism are pitiably empty responses to her sordid childhood; Evaline Hutchins, an aspiring artist with little talent whose boredom with her habit of failure leads her to suicide; J. Ward Morehouse, a self-made millionaire publicist and labor politician and a prototype of the ruthless opportunist; Richard Savage, a Harvard esthete and idealist who ultimately succumbs to the enticements of big business and becomes a Morehouse employee; Mary French, an idealistic union official who becomes disillusioned with the radical movement when her Communist fiancé marries someone of the party's choice; and Charley Anderson, a likable inventor who makes a fortune in the airplane business.

The characters' lives cross briefly and futilely. All are seen in dual perspective: publicly, as they relate to the class struggle between labor and industry; and privately, as they suffer frustration and a gnawing sense of unfulfillment. Though they are closely observed, the characters rarely get beyond social typology, so that the predominant narrative sections, ironically, are less compelling than the "device" sections. However, its scope and daring give U.S.A. distinction, and it had a powerful impact on the social novel in America.

Later Life and Work

In a 1947 auto accident Dos Passos lost an eye and his wife was killed. In 1950 he married Elizabeth H. Holdridge; their daughter was Dos Passos' only child. After 1949 he lived principally on his family farm in Westmoreland, Va. Dos Passos died on Sept. 28, 1970, in Baltimore.

Always prolific, after the war Dos Passos divided his writing between reportage and fiction. His later novels tend toward moodiness and romantic despair. District of Columbia (1952) is a trilogy consisting of Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949). A chronicle of the Spotswood family, it takes as its theme the destruction of individuals by a complex, mechanistic, industrial society. Critics were generally displeased with the trilogy.

Chosen Country (1951), an autobiographical novel; Most Likely to Succeed (1954), a novel of leftist infighting; and The Great Days (1958), a semiautobiographical novel, add up to little more than an anti-Communist warning to the effect that the end never justifies the means. This is also the substance and weakness of State of the Nation (1944), Tour of Duty (1946), the General Mills-commissioned The Prospect before Us (1950), and The Theme Is Freedom (1956).

Among Dos Passos' other nonfiction titles are The Ground We Stand On (1941), a historical survey of Anglo-American democracy; The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (1954), a biography; Prospects of a Golden Age (1959), a composite biographical account of early American culture; and The Portugal Story (1969), a historical study.

Further Reading

Dos Passos' The Best Times (1966) is a fragmentary autobiography, ranging from 1896 to 1936 but focused mainly on the 1920s; it offers an especially interesting account of his literary friendships. John H. Wrenn, John Dos Passos (1962), is a good critical biography. Excellent critical evaluations of Dos Passos may be found in Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (1934; new ed. 1951); Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction, 1920-1940 (1941); Maxwell Geismar, Writers in Crisis: The American Novel between Two Wars (1942); Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942; abr. ed. 1956); and Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955).

Additional Sources

Carr, Virginia Spencer, Dos Passos: a life, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984.

Knox, George Albert, Dos Passos and "the revolting playwrights", Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.

Ludington, Townsend, John Dos Passos: a twentieth century odyssey, New York: Dutton, 1980.

Quotes:

"People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them."

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2008)

John Dos Passos
Born	John Roderigo Dos Passos January 14, 1896 Chicago, Illinois
Died	September 28, 1970 (aged 74) Baltimore, Maryland
Occupation	novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter, translator
Nationality	American
Literary movement	Modernism, Lost Generation
Notable award(s)	Antonio Feltrinelli Prize
Influences James Joyce, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, Pío Baroja, Gustave Flaubert, William Thackeray, Stendhal, Miguel de Cervantes, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephen Crane, E.E. Cummings, Blaise Cendrars, Emile Verhaeren, Sergei Eisenstein, Thorstein Veblen, Randolph Bourne, Thomas Jefferson
Influenced Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Döblin, Camilo José Cela, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Günter Grass, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Victor Serge

John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist and artist.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Literary career 3 USA Trilogy 4 Artistic career 5 Influence 6 Dos Passos Prize 7 Literary works 8 Published as 9 External links

Early life

Dos Passos was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of John Randolph Dos Passos Jr. (1844-1917). The elder Dos Passos was a lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, the son of John Randolph Dos Passos and Mary Hays and the brother of Louis Hays Dos Passos. He was an authority on trusts and a staunch supporter of the powerful industrial conglomerates his son would come to oppose in his fictional works of the 1920s and 30s. In 1910, he married Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison, from Petersburg. Although he provided for his son's schooling, he refused to acknowledge him until two years after his marriage (when his son was 14).

The younger Dos Passos received a first-class education, enrolling at The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut in 1907 under the name John Roderigo Madison, then traveling with a private tutor on a six-month tour of France, England, Italy, Greece, and the Middle East to study the masters of classic art, architecture, and literature.

In 1912 he attended Harvard University. Following his graduation in 1916 he traveled to Spain to study art and architecture. With World War I raging in Europe and America not yet participating, Dos Passos volunteered in July 1917 for the S.S.U. 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with friends E. E. Cummings and Robert Hillyer. He worked as a driver in Paris and in north-central Italy.

By the late summer of 1918, he had completed a draft of his first novel. At the same time, he had to report for duty with the U.S. Army Medical Corps at Camp Crane in Pennsylvania. At war's end, he was stationed in Paris, where the U.S. Army Overseas Education Commission allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne. A character in U.S.A. goes through virtually the same military career and stays in Paris after the war.

Literary career

Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos' first novel was published in 1920. Titled One Man's Initiation: 1917 it was followed by an antiwar story, Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition. His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer, was a commercial success and introduced experimental stream-of-consciousness techniques into Dos Passos' method.

At this point a social revolutionary, Dos Passos came to see the United States as two nations, one rich and one poor. He wrote admiringly about the Wobblies and the injustice in the criminal convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti and joined with other notable personalities in the United States and Europe in a failed campaign to overturn their death sentences. In 1928, Dos Passos spent several months in Russia studying their socialist system. He returned to Spain with Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, but his views on the communist movement had already begun to change. Dos Passos broke with Hemingway and Herbert Matthews over their cavalier attitude towards the war and their willingness to lend their names to Stalinist propaganda efforts. (In later years, Hemingway would give Dos Passos the derogatory moniker of "the pilot fish" in his memoirs of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast.) These ideas coalesced into the USA trilogy (see below), of which the first book appeared in 1930.

Dos Passos attended the 1932 Democratic National Convention and subsequently wrote an article for The New Republic in which he harshly criticized the selection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the party's nominee. In the mid-1930s he wrote a series of scathing articles about communist political theory, and created an idealistic Communist in The Big Money who is gradually worn down and destroyed by groupthink in the party. As a result of socialism gaining popularity in Europe as a response to Fascism, there was a sharp decline in international sales of his books. His politics, which had always underpinned his work, moved far to the right. (He came to admire Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.) Nevertheless, recognition for his significant contribution in the literary field would come thirty years later in Europe when, in 1967, he was invited to Rome to accept the prestigious Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for international distinction in literature. Although Dos Passos' partisans have contended that his later work was ignored because of his changing politics, there is a consensus among critics that the quality of his novels drastically declined following U.S.A.

Between 1942 and 1945, Dos Passos worked as a journalist covering World War II. In 1947, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but tragedy struck when an automobile accident killed his wife of 18 years, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. The couple had no children. He eventually was remarried to Elizabeth Hamlyn Holdridge (1909-1998) in 1949, by whom he had an only daughter, Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos (b. 1950), and he continued to write until his death in Baltimore, Maryland in 1970. He is interred in Yeocomico Churchyard Cemetery in Cople Parish, Westmoreland County, Virginia, not far from where he had made his home.

Over his long and successful career, Dos Passos wrote forty-two novels, as well as poems, essays, and plays, and created more than 400 pieces of art.

USA Trilogy

Main article: U.S.A. trilogy

His major work is the U.S.A. trilogy comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen or 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos used experimental techniques in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings, autobiography, biography and fictional realism to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Though each novel stands on its own, the trilogy is designed to be read as a whole. Dos Passos' political and social reflections in the novel are deeply pessimistic about the political and economic direction of the United States, and few of the characters manage to hold onto their ideals through the First World War.

Artistic career

Before becoming a leading novelist of his day, John Dos Passos sketched and painted. During the summer of 1922, he studied at Hamilton Easter Field's art colony in Ogunquit, Maine. Many of his books published during the ensuing ten years used jackets and illustrations that Dos Passos created. Influenced by various movements, he merged elements of Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism to create his own unique style. And his work evolved with his first exhibition at New York's National Arts Club in 1922 and the following year at Gertrude Whitney's Studio Club in New York City.

While Dos Passos never gained recognition as a great artist, he continued to paint throughout his lifetime and his body of work was well respected. His art most often reflected his travels in Spain, Mexico, North Africa, plus the streets and cafés of the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris that he had frequented with good friends Fernand Léger, Ernest Hemingway, Blaise Cendrars, and others. Between 1925 and 1927, Dos Passos wrote plays as well as created posters and set designs for the New Playwrights Theatre in New York City. In his later years, his efforts turned to painting scenes around his residences in Maine and Virginia.

In early 2001, an exhibition titled The Art of John Dos Passos opened at the Queens Borough Library in New York City after which it moved to several locations throughout the United States.

Influence

Dos Passos' pioneering works of nonlinear fiction were a major influence in the field. In particular Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Roads To Freedom trilogy show the influence of his methods. In an often cited 1936 essay, Sartre referred to Dos Passos as "the greatest writer of our time". Perhaps the best-known work partaking of the collage technique found in U.S.A. is science fiction writer John Brunner's Hugo Award-winning 1968 "non-novel" Stand on Zanzibar, in which Brunner makes use of fictitious newspaper clippings, television announcements, and other "samples" taken from the news and entertainment media of the year 2010. Joe Haldeman's novel Mindbridge also uses the collage technique, as does his short story, "To Howard Hughes: A Modest Proposal".

Dos Passos Prize

The John Dos Passos Prize is a literary award given annually by the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University. The prize seeks to recognize "American creative writers who have produced a substantial body of significant publication that displays characteristics of John Dos Passos's writing: an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental approach to form, and an interest in a wide range of human experiences."

Literary works

• One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920)
• Three Soldiers (1921)
• A Pushcart at the Curb (1922)
• Rosinante to the Road Again (1922)
• Streets of Night (1923)
• Manhattan Transfer (1925)
• Facing the Chair (1927)
• Orient Express (1927)
• U.S.A. (1938). Three-volume set includes
  • The 42nd Parallel (1930)
  • Nineteen Nineteen (1932)
  • The Big Money (1936)
• The Ground we Stand On (1949)
• District of Columbia (1952). Three-volume set includes
  • Adventures of a Young Man (1939)
  • Number One (1943)
  • The Grand Design (1949)
• Chosen Country (1951)
• Most Likely to Succeed (1954)
• The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (1954)
• The Men Who Made the Nation (1957)
• The Great Days (1958)
• Prospects of a Golden Age (1959)
• Midcentury (1961)
• Mr. Wilson's War (1962)
• Brazil on the Move (1963)
• The Best Times: An Informal Memoir (1966)
• The Shackles of Power (1966)
• World in a Glass - A View of Our Century From the Novels of John Dos Passos (1966)
• The Portugal Story (1969)
• Century's Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle (1970)
• Easter Island: Island of Enigmas (1970)
• Lettres à Germaine Lucas Championnière (2007) - only in French

Published as

• U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money (Daniel Aaron and Townsend Ludington, eds.) (Library of America, 1996) ISBN 978-1-88301114-7.

• Novels 1920-1925: One Man's Initiation: 1917, Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer (Townsend Ludington, ed.) (Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-93108239-6.

• Travel Books & Other Writings 1916-1941: Rosinante to the Road Again; Orient Express; In All Countries; A Pushcart to the Curb; Essays, Letters, Diaries (Townsend Ludington, ed.) (Library of America, 2003) ISBN 978-1-93108240-2.

External links

• Works by John Dos Passos at Project Gutenberg
• Works by John Dos Passos at [1]PSU's Electronic Classics Series.
• Ludington, Townsend, "John Dos Passos, 1896-1970: Modernist Recorder of the American Scene", Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1996
• Three Soldiers from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• Stephen Koch, “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles” reviewed by George Packer
• John Dos Passos at Find a Grave Retrieved on 2009-02-22

Persondata
NAME	Passos, John Dos
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Artist, painter and writer
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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