John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist active in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He was well-traveled, visiting Europe and the Middle East, where he learned about literature, art, and architecture. During World War I, he was an ambulance driver for American volunteer groups in Paris and Italy before joining the United States Army Medical Corps.
In 1920 his first novel, One Man's Initiation: 1917, was published, and in 1925 his novel, Manhattan Transfer, became a commercial success. In 1928, he went to the Soviet Union to study socialism, and later became a leading participant in the 1935 First American Writers Congress sponsored by the communist-leaning League of American Writers. He was in Spain in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, when the murder of his friend José Robles soured his attitude toward communism, and led to severing his relationship with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway.
Dos Passos is best known for his U.S.A. trilogy, which consists of the novels The 42nd Parallel , 1919 and The Big Money . In 1998, the Modern Library ranked the U.S.A. Trilogy 23rd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
By the 1950s, his political views had changed dramatically, and in the 1960s, he campaigned for presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Richard M. Nixon.
An artist as well as a novelist, Dos Passos created his own cover art for his books, was influenced by modernism in 1920s Paris and painted. He died on September 28, 1970, in Baltimore. Spence's Point, his Virginia estate, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971.
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works”
"Looking Back on U.S.A.," New York Times, Oct 25 1959
Context: If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.
"The Business of a Novelist," review of William Rollins's The Shadow Before, 1934
Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), pp. 365-366
“A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.”
Introduction to 1932 Modern Library edition of Three Soldiers
Context: The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.
Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), p. 403
"An Interview with Mr. John Dos Passos," New York Times, Nov 23 1941
"Sacco and Vanzetti," review of Eugene Lyons's The Life and Death of Sacco and Vanzetti, Nov 1927
Interview, Feb 3 1964, reproduced in Talks With Authors, ed. Charles F. Madden
Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), p. 365
Manhattan Transfer (1925)
Remark at the International PEN Club conference, Sept 11-13 1941, reproduced in John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer
“Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.”
Response to the questionnaire "Whiter the American Writer?" in Modern Quarterly, Summer 1932
Presentation at Carleton College, Nov 30 1960
"A Humble Protest," Harvard Monthly, 1916
"Statement of Belief," Bookman, Sept 1928
Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), pp. 403-404
"Conversation with Dos Passos," New Leader, Feb 23 1959
Discussion session with students at Union College, Oct 16 1968, reproduced in John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer
Diary, Oct 1 1918, reproduced in The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington
