“For something like forty years I've been getting various sorts of narratives off my chest without being able to hit upon a classification for them. There's something dreary to me about the publisher's arbitrary division of every word written for publication into fiction and nonfiction. My writing has a most irritating way of being difficult to classify in either category. At times I would find it hard to tell you whether the stuff is prose or verse. Gradually I've come up with the tag: contemporary chronicle.”

— John Dos Passos

Presentation at Carleton College, Nov 30 1960

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John Dos Passos 25

novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter 1896–1970

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