Dos Passos, << dohs PAS ohs, >> John (1896-1970), was an American novelist whose work is dominated by social and political themes. His experiments in fiction earned him distinction as an avant-garde novelist in the 1920’s and 1930’s (see Avant-garde).
Dos Passos first achieved fame with his World War I novels, One Man’s Initiation (1917) and Three Soldiers (1921). Three Soldiers protests the impact of war on civilization and art. Manhattan Transfer (1925) reveals Dos Passos’s disillusioned response to postwar urban America. This novel led to his most famous work, the U.S.A. trilogy, which pessimistically surveys the disintegration of U.S. culture that Dos Passos believed took place in the early 1900’s. The trilogy consists of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
U.S.A. brings together many characters in a wide variety of episodes. Dos Passos featured a technique called the Newsreel, which used newspaper headlines, words from popular songs, and advertisements to surround the action and characters. Another technique, called The Camera’s Eye, gives the author’s view of his subject. Dos Passos regarded his style as providing a social and historical background in which individual actions reflected the often desperate larger patterns he saw in United States society.
John Roderigo Dos Passos was born on Jan. 14, 1896, in Chicago and attended Harvard University. He was a political liberal in his early years but moved sharply toward conservatism by the 1940’s. His District of Columbia trilogy—Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949)—reveals his conservative attitudes. Dos Passos also wrote Mr. Wilson’s War (1962), a history of World War I. Dos Passos died on Sept. 28, 1970.
