“The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.”

—  John Dos Passos

"Statement of Belief," Bookman, Sept 1928

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John Dos Passos25
novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter 1896–1970

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