“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.”

—  John Dos Passos

"The Business of a Novelist," review of William Rollins's The Shadow Before, 1934

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John Dos Passos 25
novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter 1896–1970

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