John Dos Passos

Who Was John Dos Passos?

John Dos Passos was one of the most formally ambitious American novelists of the twentieth century — a writer whose U.S.A. trilogy attempted nothing less than a comprehensive portrait of American life in the first three decades of the century, rendered through a formal innovation that remains one of the most impressive achievements in the history of the American novel. Born in Chicago in 1896, the illegitimate son of a corporation lawyer of Portuguese descent, he was educated at Harvard and served as an ambulance driver in France and Italy during the First World War, an experience that shaped his politics and his literary vision for decades.

The U.S.A. trilogy — The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) — interweaves multiple narrative strands with “Newsreel” sections of newspaper headlines and song lyrics, “Camera Eye” sections of stream-of-consciousness autobiography, and prose-poem portraits of historical figures. The effect is a polyphonic rendering of American culture that no single narrative voice could achieve.

Dos Passos is significant for TLA because his trilogy raises, through its very form, the question of whether the American story is coherent — whether the competing voices, narratives, and experiences that constitute the nation can be held together in a single story, and what happens when they cannot.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Three Soldiers — 1921
• Manhattan Transfer — 1925
• The 42nd Parallel — 1930 — U.S.A. I
• 1919 — 1932 — U.S.A. II
• The Big Money — 1936 — U.S.A. III