John Dos Passos

Born in Chicago, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos (1844–1917), a lawyer of half-Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison (Sprigg) Madison of Petersburg, Virginia.

His father was married at the time and had a son several years older than John.

As a child, John traveled extensively with his mother, who was sickly and preferred Europe.

John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his U.S.A. trilogy.

After he returned with his mother to the US, Dos Passos was enrolled in 1907 at the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall), a private college-preparatory school in Wallingford, Connecticut, under the name John Roderigo Madison.

His parents later arranged for him to travel with a private tutor on a six-month tour of France, England, Italy, Greece, and southwest Asia, to study the masters of classical art, architecture, and literature.

John's father married Lucy after the death of his first wife in 1910, when John was 14, but he refused to formally acknowledge John for another two years.

In 1912, Dos Passos enrolled in Harvard College, where he became friends with classmate e.e. cummings, who said there was a "foreignness" about Dos Passos, and that "no one at Harvard looked less like an American."

Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916.

He traveled widely as a young man, visiting Europe and southwest Asia, where he learned about literature, art, and architecture.

During World War I, he was an ambulance driver for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in Paris and Italy, before joining the United States Army Medical Corps as a private.

Following his graduation cum laude in 1916, Dos Passos traveled to Spain to study art and architecture.

In July 1917, with World War I raging in Europe, Dos Passos volunteered for the Sanitary Squad Unit (S.S.U.) 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with friends Cummings and Robert Hillyer.

Later, he also worked as a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Red Cross in north-central Italy.

By the late summer of 1918, Dos Passos had completed a draft of his first novel.

At the same time, he had to report for duty with the U.S. Army Medical Corps at Camp Crane in Pennsylvania.

On Armistice Day, he was stationed in Paris, where the U.S. Army Overseas Education Commission allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne.

Three Soldiers, his novel drawn from those experiences, features a character who has virtually the same military career as the writer and stays in Paris after the war.

In 1920, his first novel, One Man's Initiation: 1917, was published, and in 1925, his novel Manhattan Transfer became a commercial success.

As an artist, Dos Passos created his own cover art for his books, influenced by modernism in 1920s Paris.

He died in Baltimore, Maryland.

John Randolph Dos Passos was an authority on trusts, and a staunch supporter of the powerful industrial conglomerates that his son expressly criticized in his fictional works during the 1920s and 1930s.

Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, One Man's Initiation: 1917, which was written in the trenches during World War I. It was followed by the antiwar novel, Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition.

His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer, was a commercial success, and introduced experimental stream-of-consciousness techniques.

In 1928, he traveled to the Soviet Union, curious about its social and political experiment, though he left with mixed impressions.

His experiences during the Spanish Civil War disillusioned him with left-wing politics while also severing his relationship with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway.

In 1928, Dos Passos spent several months in Russia studying socialism.

His U.S.A. trilogy, which consists of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), was ranked by the Modern Library in 1998 as 23rd of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Written in experimental, non-linear form, the trilogy blends elements of biography and news reports to paint a landscape of early 20th-century American culture.

Beyond his writing, Dos Passos is known for his shift in political views.

Following his experiences in World War I, he became interested in socialism and pacifism, which also influenced his early work.

Those ideas also coalesced into the U.S.A. trilogy, of which the first book appeared in 1930.

A social revolutionary, Dos Passos came to see the United States as two nations, one rich and one poor.

He wrote admiringly about the Industrial Workers of the World, and the injustice in the criminal convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and joined with other notable figures in the United States and Europe in a failed campaign to overturn their death sentences.

He was a leading participant in the April 1935 First Americans Writers Congress, sponsored by the Communist-leaning League of American Writers, but he eventually balked at the idea that Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, would have control over creative writers in the United States.

In 1936–1937, Dos Passos served on the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, commonly known as the "Dewey Commission", with other notable figures such as Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, Edmund Wilson, and chairman John Dewey.

It had been set up following the first of the Moscow "Show Trials" in 1936, part of the massive purges of Soviet party leaders and intellectuals in that period.

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 Nixon.

Spence's Point, his Virginia estate, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1971.