(Unique among American books for its epic scope and panora...)
Unique among American books for its epic scope and panoramic social sweep, U.S.A. has long been acknowledged as a monument of modern fiction. Now The Library of America presents an exclusive one-volume edition of this enduring masterwork by John Dos Passos, including for the first time detailed notes and a chronicle of the world events that serve as a backdrop.
In the novels that make up the trilogyThe 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big MoneyDos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics.
A startling range of experimental devices captures the textures and background noises of twentieth-century life: Newsreels with blaring headlines; autobiographical Camera Eye sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness; biographies evoking emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen, and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling power, tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the Depression.
The U.S.A. trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. Their crisscrossing destinies take in wars and revolutions, desperate love affairs and harrowing family crises, corrupt public triumphs and private catastrophes, in settings that include the trenches of World War I, insurgent Mexico, Hollywood studios in the silent era, Wall Street boardrooms, and the tumultuous streets of Boston just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
The volume contains newly researched chronologies of Dos Passoss life and of world events cited in U.S.A., notes, and an essay on textual selection.
(A comprehensive study of the high ideals of Jefferson's i...)
A comprehensive study of the high ideals of Jefferson's influence in American politics from his own presidency to the administration of John Quincy Adams
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A record of his childhood, young adulthood, and twentie...)
A record of his childhood, young adulthood, and twenties, The Best Times is a collage of cherished memories. He reflects on the joys of an itinerant life enriched by new and diverse friendships, customs, cultures, and cuisines.
Luminary personalities and landscapes abound in the 1920s literary world Dos Passos loved. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Horsley Ganttthey are his beloved friends. Spain, the French Riviera, Paris, Persia, the Caucasusthey are his beloved footpaths.
(Physical description: 485 p ; 22 cm. Notes: Cover design ...)
Physical description: 485 p ; 22 cm. Notes: Cover design by Anita Bleecker makes use of original drawins by Reginald Marsh. Summary: A novel about a man with a European background and a woman whose culture is mid-west American, following their different lives after a childhood meeting until their reunion as adults after World War. Subject: Romance fiction. Victorians / Edwardians / The Lost Generation. Genre: Fiction.
The Portugal Story: Three Centuries of Exploration and Discovery
(This selective history of Portugal reflects the authors ...)
This selective history of Portugal reflects the authors fascination with his own Portuguese/Madeiran heritage. The work tracks the nations rise and fall as a world power, drawing from the authors travels and archival research.
Dos Passos, writes historian J. H. Plumb, brings to his material a novelists acute eye for human character and a narrative skill that any historian might envy; and he has produced one of the most readable books on the subject that I know.
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Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest wor...)
Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike. From Fourteenth Street to the Bowery, Delmonico's to the underbelly of the city waterfront, Dos Passos chronicles the lives of characters struggling to become a part of modernity before they are destroyed by it.
More than seventy-five years after its first publication, Manhattan Transfer still stands as "a novel of the very first importance" (Sinclair Lewis). It is a masterpeice of modern fiction and a lasting tribute to the dual-edged nature of the American dream.
(Dust jacket notes: "This discerning study of a man and an...)
Dust jacket notes: "This discerning study of a man and an era reveals the influences which created the most extraordinary mind in the early days of the Republic. As Max Eastman says, 'I think John Dos Passos has done a great service to his country and the free world by lending his talents to this task. He has revived the heart and mind of Jefferson, not by psycho-analytical lucubrations or soulful gush, but in the main by telling story after story of those whose lives and thoughts impinged upon his. And Jefferson's mind and heart are so livingly related to our problems today that the result seems hardly to be history.' This is no ordinary biography. Mr. Dos Passos has woven all quotations from Jefferson's writings and conversations and those of his contemporaries into the text to form an unbroken story. Since he has let his characters speak in their own words, the reader gets the impression of actually living in the period instead of merely reading about it...."
(Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and...)
Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence, and the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine on ordinary soldiers.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Before John Dos Passos enjoys fame as a chronicler and ...)
Before John Dos Passos enjoys fame as a chronicler and critic of American society, he wins recognition for command of aesthetics. Orient Express, a memoir of the authors travels through Eastern Europe, the Near East, and the Middle East, focuses on sights, sounds, and smells rather than plot or character. Dos Passos applies his instincts as a painter to mountain ranges and grimy alleyways, finding beauty everywhere.
His tour extends from Tiflis, Georgia, to Erivan, Armenia, and Marrakesh, Morocco; from Kasvin, Iran, to Baghdad, Iraq, and Damascus, Syria. He crosses the Syrian Desert, observes the aftermath of the Greek-Turkish War, climbs the Caucasus, explores Persia during the rise of Reza Kahn, and records the creation of Iraq by the British. His message is clear and relevant to contemporary travelers: holiness and happiness abounds in the East as much as the West.
With the name of Allah for all baggage, Dos Passos writes, you could travel from the Great Wall of China to the Niger and be fairly sure of food, and often of money, if only you were ready to touch your forehead in the dust five times a day and put away self and the glamorous West. And yet, he adds, the West is conquering.
Mr. Wilson's War: From the Assassination of McKinley to the Defeat of the League of Nations
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Beginning with the assassination of McKinley and ending...)
Beginning with the assassination of McKinley and ending with the defeat of the League of Nations by the United States Senate, the twenty-year period covered by John Dos Passos in this lucid and fascinating narrative changed the whole destiny of America. This is the story of the war we won and the peace we lost, told with a clear historical perspective and a warm interest in the remarkable people who guided the United States through one of the most crucial periods.
Foremost in the cast of characters is Woodrow Wilson, the shy, brilliant, revered, and misunderstood schoolmaster, whose administration was a complex of apparent contradictions. Wilson had almost no interest in foreign affairs when he was first elected, yet later, in proposing the League of Nations, he was to play a major role in international politics. During his first summer in office, without any previous experience in banking, he pushed through the Federal Reserve Bank Act, perhaps his most lasting contribution. Reelected in 1916 on the rallying cry, He kept us out of war, he shortly found himself and his country inextricably involved in the European conflict.
John Dos Passos has brilliantly coordinated the political, the military, and the economic themes so that the story line never falters. First published in 1962, Mr. Wilsons War is one of the great books and an addition of major stature to any readers library
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist active in the first half of the twentieth century.
Background
John Dos Passos was born on 14 January in 1896 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The illegitimate son of a noted New York lawyer, John Randolph Dos Passos, and a wealthy Virginian, Lucy Addison Sprigg. His father did not acknowledge paternity until a year before his death, when the young Dos Passos was 20. As a boy, Dos Passos lived principally on the Virginia farm of his mother's family, and he also traveled frequently with his mother to Mexico, Belgium, and England.
Education
In 1907 Dos Passos attended Choate School under the name John Roderigo Madison. He graduated from Harvard in 1916, meanwhile publishing stories, verse, and reviews in the Harvard Monthly. In 1917 Dos Passos was in Spain, studying Spanish culture.
Career
During World War I John Dos Passos enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Unit and served in Spain and Italy. In 1918 he became a private in the U. S. Medical Corps, serving in France. Demobilized in 1919, he remained in Europe to finish two novels: One Man's Initiation—1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). During the 1920s Dos Passos worked as a newspaper correspondent and traveled extensively but, as an increasingly successful author, he lived chiefly in New York.
One Man's Initiation—1917, based on Dos Passos' experiences as an ambulance corpsman, is poignantly antiwar. It also foreshadows a more pervasive theme of his work: contemporary technological society's crippling effects on its inhabitants.
Dos Passos' first significant novel, Three Soldiers, is a bitterly ironic commentary on the professed ideals for which World War I was fought and, more deeply, on the "values" by which modern, mechanized man lives. Dos Passos sees the real enemy as the army itself, which by exacerbating the ordinary weaknesses and inner conflicts of its members causes irreparable harm. His three major characters are entirely broken by army life. Three Soldiers is part of an anti-World War I literary tradition that includes works by Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves, E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, and Erich Maria Remarque.
Manhattan Transfer (1925) is Dos Passos' first major experimental novel. Set in New York, it is a panoramic view of the frustrations and defeats of contemporary urban life. Frequently shifting focus among its marginally related characters, the novel details an oppressive picture of human calamity and defeat; fires, accidents, brawls, crimes, and suicides abound, and unhappiness is pervasive. The novel is uneven; it is contrived in its plotting and confusing in its use of time but interesting and especially noteworthy for its development of formal devices that would be better employed in U. S. A.
Dos Passos' 1920s output also included a volume of free verse, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922); two impressionistic travel books, Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) and Orient Express (1927); a novel, Streets of Night (1923); two plays; and a tract in defense of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, Facing the Chair (1927).
The political implications of Dos Passos' early writings are clearly socialist, and in 1926 he helped found the New Masses, a Marxist political and cultural journal, to which he contributed until the early 1930s. In 1927 he was jailed in Boston for picketing on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1928 he visited the Soviet Union. Returning to the United States in 1929, he married Katherine F. Smith.
After a one-man show of his sketches in 1937, Dos Passos went to Spain to help Hemingway and Joris Ivens make a film documentary of the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Earth. Dos Passos and Hemingway, who had earlier survived an auto accident together, were good friends until Dos Passos' sympathies with the anarchist faction estranged Hemingway, who was partial to the main Loyalist forces.
U. S. A. (1937), Dos Passos' masterpiece, is a trilogy made up of The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen-Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936). To solve the time problem that flawed Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos employed three unusual devices: "The Camera Eye, " autobiographical episodes rendered in a Joycean stream of consciousness; "Newsreel, " a Dada-like pastiche of mass culture, combining fragments of pop songs, newspaper headlines, and political speeches; and short biographies, impressionistic sketches of some of the prominent figures of the 1900-1930 time span—Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Thomas A. Edison, Charles Steinmetz, and others.
Always prolific, after the war Dos Passos divided his writing between reportage and fiction. His later novels tend toward moodiness and romantic despair. District of Columbia (1952) is a trilogy consisting of Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949). A chronicle of the Spotswood family, it takes as its theme the destruction of individuals by a complex, mechanistic, industrial society. Critics were generally displeased with the trilogy.
Chosen Country (1951), an autobiographical novel; Most Likely to Succeed (1954), a novel of leftist infighting; and The Great Days (1958), a semiautobiographical novel, add up to little more than an anti-Communist warning to the effect that the end never justifies the means. This is also the substance and weakness of State of the Nation (1944), Tour of Duty (1946), the General Mills-commissioned The Prospect before Us (1950), and The Theme Is Freedom (1956).
Among Dos Passos' other nonfiction titles are The Ground We Stand On (1941), a historical survey of Anglo-American democracy; The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (1954), a biography; Prospects of a Golden Age (1959), a composite biographical account of early American culture; and The Portugal Story (1969), a historical study.
After 1949 he lived principally on his family farm in Westmoreland, Va. Dos Passos died on September 28, 1970, in Baltimore.
As a political reporter for the New Republic and other journals during the early 1930s, Dos Passos covered labor flareups, political conventions, the Depression, and the New Deal. His fundamental distrust of organized society extended to organizations as well, and despite his sympathy with many Communist causes he was always a maverick rather than a party radical. In 1934 an overt rift developed between Dos Passos and the Communist movement, and it marked the beginning of a long shift to the right in his political sympathies.
In 1940 Dos Passos became active in behalf of political refugees, and during World War II did a good deal of war writing, principally for Harper's and Life magazines, for whom he later covered the postwar Nuremberg trials.
By the 1950s, his political views had changed dramatically, and he had become more conservative. In the 1960s, he campaigned for presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Richard M. Nixon.
Views
Quotations:
"People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them. "
"What is the use being a big man if you are wrong?"
"Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money. "
"The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs. "
"Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension. "
"Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older. "
"The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice. "
"If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard. "
"A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief. "
"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works. "
Membership
In 1947, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Personality
In a 1947 auto accident Dos Passos lost an eye.
Interests
Before becoming a leading novelist of his day, John Dos Passos sketched and painted. During the summer of 1922, he studied at Hamilton Easter Field's art colony in Ogunquit, Maine. Many of his books published during the ensuing ten years used jackets and illustrations that Dos Passos created. Influenced by various movements, he merged elements of Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism to create his own unique style. And his work evolved with his first exhibition at New York's National Arts Club in 1922 and the following year at Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's Studio Club in New York City.
While Dos Passos never gained recognition as a great artist, he continued to paint throughout his lifetime and his body of work was well respected. His art most often reflected his travels in Spain, Mexico, North Africa, plus the streets and cafés of the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris that he had frequented with good friends Fernand Léger, Ernest Hemingway, Blaise Cendrars, and others.
Between 1925 and 1927, Dos Passos wrote plays as well as created posters and set designs for the New Playwrights Theatre in New York City. In his later years, his attention turned to painting scenes around his residences in Maine and Virginia.
In early 2001, an exhibition titled The Art of John Dos Passos opened at the Queens Borough Library in New York City. It toured to several locations throughout the United States.
Connections
An automobile accident killed his wife of 18 years, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. The couple had no children. Dos Passos married Elizabeth Hamlyn Holdridge (1909–1998) in 1949, by whom he had one daughter, Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos (b. 1950).