John Dos Passos 
(1896 - 1970)
 
Category:  American Literature
 
Born:  January 14, 1896
Chicago, Illinois, United States
 
Died:  September 28, 1970
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
John Roderigo Dos Passos, born January 14, 1896 in Chicago, Illinois, United States - died September 28, 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland, was a novelist and artist.
John Dos Passos' father was a wealthy Chicago lawyer and could afford to give him the best education. In 1907, he was sent to study at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut then went 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 1913 he went to Harvard University. Following his graduation from university, in 1916 he traveled to Spain to study art and architecture. With World War I raging in Europe and America not yet participating, along with friends E. E. Cummings and Robert Hillyer, in July of 1917 John Dos Passos volunteered with the S.S.U. 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, working as a driver in Paris, France and in north-central Italy. By the late summer of 1918, he had completed a draft of his first novel just at the 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.
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.
However, 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 to more than just a minor hobby with his first exhibition at New York's National Arts Club in 1922 and the follo
wing 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 Leger, Ernest Hemingway, Blaise Cendrars and others. Between 1925 and 1927, Dos Passos wrote plays as well as creating 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.
A social revolutionary, Dos Passos came to see the United States as two nations, one rich and one poor. He wrote about the injustice in the criminal convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti and joined with other notable personalities in the United States and Europe in a 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 and as he grew older, he all but abandoned much of the leftist political rhetoric of his youth. In the mid-1930s he wrote a series of scathing articles about communist political theory. At a time when socialism was gaining popularity in Europe as a response to Fascism, Dos Passos' writings resulted in a sharp decline in international sales of his books. 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 Felltrinelli Prize for international distinction in literature.
Over his long and successful career, Dos Passos wrote forty-two novels, poems, essays, and plays, and created more than 400 pieces of art. His major work is the trilogy U.S.A. that comprised The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos used an experimental technique in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings, diary entries, and the like to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the Twentieth Century.
During World War II, John Dos Passos worked as a journalist covering the war between 1942 and 1945. In 1947 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters but tragedy struck in the form of an automobile accident that killed his wife of 18 years, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. He eventually remarried to Elizabeth Holdridge (1909-1998) and through the 1950s and 1960s, Dos Passos continued to write until his death in 1970. He was interred in the churchyard cemetery in Yeocomico Churchyard Cemetery in Cople Parish, Westmoreland County, Virginia, not far from where he had made his home.
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.
1920
One Man's Initiation-- 1917. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos went to Europe after graduating from Harvard, and later joined the U.S. medical corps. Dos Passos's first novel draws on his experiences during World War I as a member of the French ambulance service.
1921
Three Soldiers. One of the greatest American fictional responses to World War I is this account of the experiences of three American doughboys-- an Italian American, an Indiana farm boy, and a Harvard graduate--who become disillusioned in different ways.
1922
A Pushcart at the Curb. Dos Passos's poetry collection provides glimpses of the war, travels in Spain and Italy, and New York City street scenes. He also publishes an impressionistic collection of travel essays on Spanish life and culture, Rosinante to the Road Againleftist.
1923
Streets of Night. Dos Passos would call his third novel, about the frustrations of a youth at Harvard, "an effort to recapture the strange stagnation of the intellectual class I'd felt so strangling during college."
1925
Manhattan Transfer. Dos Passos's first attempt at an experimental collective novel interweaves the stories of multiple characters in a series of montage-like episodes to replicate the vibrant, interconnected texture of New York City life. Sinclair Lewis declares that the novel could inaugurate "the vast and blazing dawn we have awaited. It may be the foundation of a whole new school of fiction."
1926
The Garbage Man: A Parade with Shouting. Produced in 1925 as The Moon Is a Gong, this experimental play attacks social oppression. It is chiefly significant for previewing the dramatic montage effects Dos Passos would incorporate in his fiction.
1927
Orient Express. Dos Passos's travel diary of his trip on the Orient Express shows a widening perspective and a growing international social awareness.
1928
Airways, Inc. This play, produced in 1929, concerns the tragedy that besets the family of a famous aviator.
1930
42nd Parallel. The first volume of the U.S.A. trilogy interweaves the stories of five characters along the west-to-east storm track of the forty-second parallel. The novel extends the experimental methods of Manhattan Transfer (1925), including the narrative innovations of the "Newsreel" (documentary materials), the "Camera Eye" (stream-of-consciousness personal commentary on his subjects), and brief biographies of important historical figures, such as Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and Bill Haywood. The trilogy is Dos Passos's masterwork, a panoramic portrait of the first three decades of the twentieth century in America.
1932
1919. The second volume in Dos Passos's monumental U.S.A. trilogy chronicles American life through the war years, from the vantage point of five central figures--a sailor, a minister's daughter, a Texas girl, a Jewish radical, and a young poet. It is interspersed with short biographies of historical figures such as John Reed, Theodore Roosevelt, Joe Hill, and J. P. Morgan. It had been preceded by The 42nd Parallel (1930) and would be followed by The Big Money (1936).
1933
Fortune Heights. The play traces the rise and fall of a real estate development. It would be collected in Three Plays (1934).
1934
In All Countries. Dos Passos provides accounts of his travels in Russia, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, including reflections on the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the 1932 presidential conventions.
1936
The Big Money. In the final novel of the writer's U.S.A. trilogy (collected 1938), preceded by The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932), Dos Passos concludes his epic social documentation of America in the first three decades of the twentieth century with the boom times of the 1920s.
1938
Journeys Between Wars. The writer compiles extracts from his previous travel books with new accounts of the Spanish Civil War.
1938
U.S.A. Dos Passos collects his trio of novels--The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)--to form a technically innovative social panorama of American life and history during the first three decades of the century.
1939
Adventures of a Young Man. In the first volume of a family saga trilogy that would be followed by Number One (1943) and The Grand Design (1949), Dos Passos dramatizes the story of an idealistic Communist betrayed by the party. Critic Philip Rahv would call the novel "perhaps the most thoughtful and realistic portrait of the radical movement that has so far been produced by an American writer."
1941
The Ground We Stand On. In a series of biographical portraits of figures such as Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, Dos Passos attempts to document the human impact of the pursuit of liberty.
1943
Number One. Second in a trilogy following Adventures of a Young Man (1939), the novel concerns a Huey Long-like Southern politician and demagogue ruthless in his political ambitions and destructive to those who help him on his way up. Contemporaries view the novel either as vintage Dos Passos or as evidence of a slackening of his powers.
1944
State of the Nation. Based on magazine articles written during a tour of America in 1943, the book impressionistically reports on the nation during wartime.
1946
Tour of Duty. The author views events from December 1945 to December 1946, from different vantage points in Europe and the Pacific. While some critics note a diminishment of a former powerful writing talent, others praise Dos Passos's reportorial skills.
1949
The Grand Design. In the conclusion of his trilogy on the Spottswood family, Dos Passos chronicles the New Deal years and the failures of the Roosevelt administration. Despite praise for the novel's vivid evocation of Washington during the Depression and World War II, critics detect a conservative shift in Dos Passos's views and a reduction of his former daring experimental methods to the simplifications of a propagandist.
1961
Midcentury. Dos Passos's final novel shows his return to the broad-canvas techniques of the U.S.A. trilogy, tracing the decline and fall of the labor movement and celebrating American capitalism. Although sporadically showing signs of his former power, particularly in his brilliant biographical profile of actor James Dean, the work is mainly noteworthy for demonstrating Dos Passos's increasingly conservative views, expressed in previous novels such as Chosen Country (1951), Most Likely to Succeed (1954), and The Great Days (1958), as well as in nonfiction works such as The Theme Is Freedom (1956) and Occasions and Protests (1964).

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