Born January 14, 1896 in Chicago, John Dos Passos was the illegitimate or “love child” of eminent lawyer John Randolph Dos Passos and his married mistress, Lucy Sprigg Madison. Dos Passos did not know who his real father was until shortly before Dos Passos Sr.’s death, and prior to that young John had been raised by his mother, traveling often or spending time with her family in Virginia.
World War I and The Lost Generation
Dos Passos graduated from Harvard in 1916, and upon the outbreak of World War I he became a military ambulance driver. His early novels, One Man’s Initiation and Three Soldiers, were published shortly after the war and reflect Dos Passos’ own experiences as well as those he had observed or heard about firsthand. Like his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque, Dos Passos utilized fiction to show the hellish aspects of combat and the complexity of the “common” soldier.
By now, Dos Passos had become part of what was known as The Lost Generation, joining other American writers in the group such as Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and poet E.E. Cummings. The Lost Generation found post-war society to be hollow and hypocritical, and they preferred to live and work in exile, generally gravitating toward Paris.
The U.S.A. Trilogy
Dos Passos continued to write prolifically, and in 1925 he published Manhattan Transfer, an innovative novel paced to match the erratic rhythm of 1920s American urban life. His technique began to attract critical attention, and Dos Passos would continue on in this vein with his celebrated U.S.A. Trilogy, published in three volumes over the course of 1932 to 1936.
The U.S.A. Trilogy is made up of The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. All three novels trace the scope of the American experience through characters of different social classes and temperaments: men, women, wealthy, poor, blueblood, immigrant, ambitious or just completely overwhelmed.
Rather than using straight prose or a complicated layering of chapters, Dos Passos instead created a fascinating, almost cinematic effect of impressionistic sentences, slang, and “Newsreel” and “Camera Eye” features. The fates of his characters often intertwine and along with the shifting narrative are short, swift profiles of famous Americans, all in all giving us a vivid portrait of the United States in the early 20th century, almost more like a living history than a novel.
Midcentury and Legacy
Initially tending toward radical politics and journalism, Dos Passos was arrested in 1927 for protesting during the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Though he visited the Soviet Union, Dos Passos was wary of large, controlling governments and therefore could not totally embrace Communism. In the late 1930s, Dos Passos had a rift with Ernest Hemingway over alliances within the Spanish Civil War, and although the two had been friends and traveling companions for years, they went their separate ways.
In 1947, Dos Passos was seriously injured in an auto accident that also claimed the life of his first wife. He remarried and spent most of his remaining years on his Virginia farm. In 1961 he published the novel Midcentury, similar in theme and technique to the U.S.A. Trilogy, but which of course reflected the subsequent decades and Dos Passos’ increasingly conservative political views.
John Dos Passos died in 1970. His early works are regarded highly in the field of American literature, and The John Dos Passos Prize is an annual award made by Longwood University to the best yet generally overlooked American authors of our time.
