John Dos Passos

John Roderigo Dos Passos (Chicago, 1896 - Baltimore, 1970) was an American novelist and journalist, and one of the central figures of the so-called Lost Generation. Writing in English during the first decades of the twentieth century, amid the ferment of modernism, he left behind a vivid picture of urban and political life in the United States that still repays careful reading.

He was the illegitimate son of a lawyer of partly Madeiran Portuguese descent, and he spent much of his childhood travelling in Europe with his mother. At Harvard he became friends with e. e. cummings. During the First World War he drove ambulances in France and Italy before joining the medical corps of the US Army. That experience fed his early novels, including Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition.

After the war he spent long stretches in Paris, where he encountered the avant-garde, and he travelled through Spain and the Near East. Manhattan Transfer (1925) made him known well beyond the United States. Its fragmented, interwoven stories of New Yorkers in the 1920s introduced a technique he would develop in the U.S.A. trilogy, published between 1930 and 1936. The trilogy blends fiction with short biographies and fragments of newspaper reporting, building a mosaic of American society in the early twentieth century.

His politics shifted over the course of his life. Sympathetic to socialism and angered by the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, he visited the Soviet Union in 1928 and came away with mixed impressions. The Spanish Civil War proved decisive. The disappearance of his friend and translator José Robles, which is widely believed to have been the work of Soviet security services, along with his quarrel with Hemingway, pushed him away from communism for good. In later decades he moved to the right and supported Republican candidates, including Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.

His legacy rests chiefly on his experimental method and his choral portrait of a changing nation, which influenced later novelists. Critics continue to debate his final years, which some have described as those of a disillusioned man, but the U.S.A. trilogy remains one of the great panoramas of American fiction.