JOHN DOS PASSOS (1947)

One of the major novelist of the post-World War I "lost generation" whose reputation as a social historian and as a radical critic of the quality of American life rests primarily on his trilogy U.S.A.

The son of a wealthy lawyer of Portuguese descent. Dos Passos graduated from Harvard University (1916) and volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I. His early works were basically portraits of the artists recoiling from the shock of his encounter with a brutal world. Among these was the bitter antiwar novel Three Soldiers (1921).

Dos Passos developed slowly. Extensive travel in Spain and other countries while working as a newspaper correspondent in the postwar years enlarged his sense of history, sharpened his social perception and confirmed his radical sympathies. Gradually his early subjectivism was subordinated to a larger and tougher objective realism. His first collective novel Manhattan Transfer (1925) is a rapid-transit rider´s view of the metropolis that shuttles back and forth between the lives of more than a dozen characters in nervous, jerky, impressionistic flashes. In this work Dos Passos highly experimental technique matches the frenzied pace of modern urban life.

The execution of the Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 profoundly affected Dos Passos who had participated in the losing battle to win their pardon. The crisis crystallized his image of the United States as "two nations" -one of the rich and privileged and one of the poor and powerless. U.S.A. is the portrait of these two nations. It consists of the 42nd Parallel (1930) covering the period from 1900 up to the war; 1919 (1932) dealing with the war and the critical year of the Treaty of Versailles; and The Big Money (1936) which races headlong through the boom of the 20s to the bust of the 30s.

Using experimental techniques derived from European Impressionism and Expressionism, Dos Passos reinforces the histories of his fictional characters with a sense of real history conveyed by the interpolated devices of "newsreels", artfully selected montages of actual newspaper headlines and popular songs of the day. 

He also interpolates biographies of such representative members of the establishment as the automobile maker Henry Ford, the inventor Thomas Edison, Pres. Woodrow Wilson and the financer J.P. Morgan and of representatives of that order nation such as the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, the economist Thorstein Veblen, the labour organizer Joe Hill and the Unknown Soldier of World War I. These biographies arew among Dos Passos most successful experimental devices.

Yet another dimension is provided by his "camera-Eye" technique, brief, poetic, personal reminiscences. The whole conveys a sweeping, swift-moving, cinematic image of the era.

Dos Passos arrives at the height of his powers in The Big Money. In this work, his characters, earlier criticized as mere case histories, are fully realized and deeply felt, although all are predestined by the author´s controlling pessimistic vision, to failure.

U.S.A. was followed by a second, less ambitious District of Columbia trilogy (Adventures of a Young Man, 1939; Number One, 1943; The Grand Design, 1949) which chronicles Dos Passos further disillusion with the labour movement, radical politics and New Deal liberalism.

The decline of his creative energy and the increasing political conservatism evident in these works became even more pronounced in subsequent works. At his death at 74 his books scarcely received critical attention.

Among the "lost generation" novelists Dos Passos is probably the most intellectual and the most relentlessly serious. For this reason and because his techniques are demanding, he has had less general popularity but has enjoyed international critical prestige. Jean-Paul Sartre who patterned his own novels on Dos Passos work has called him "the greatest American novelist". He has influenced the German novelist Günter Grass and his works were acclaimed in the Soviet Union where his failure to affirm faith in the radical workingclass movement was a great disappointment.