Read complete books and articles on: John Dos Passos

Dos Passos, John Roderigo - 1896–1970, American novelist, b. Chicago, grad. Harvard, 1916. He subsequently studied in Spain and served as a World War I ambulance driver in France and Italy. In his fiction, Dos Passos is said to have mingled the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser with the modernism of James Joyce. His first successful novel, Three Soldiers (1921), belonged to the group of socially conscious novels of disillusionment that appeared after the war. With Manhattan Transfer (1925) his major creative period began. Intertwining accounts of a succession of unrelated characters, the novel presents a composite picture of the meaninglessness and decadence of the life of the typical early 1920s New Yorker. In his finest achievement, the trilogy U.S.A. (1937), composed of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), he developed the kaleidoscopic technique introduced in Manhattan Transfer. By skillfully weaving together narration, stream of consciousness, biographies of representative figures, and quotations from newspapers and magazines, Dos Passos portrayed the first three decades of the 20th cent. in America.

After U.S.A. the radical left-wing views that strongly colored his earlier works gave way to a conservative social philosophy. In his second trilogy, District of Columbia (1952), which includes Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949), he defended many of the principles he had previously criticized. In general, his later works lack the power and cohesion of his earlier novels, although Midcentury (1961) again skillfully presents the conflicts of contemporary society. His nonfiction works include Tour of Duty (1946), Men Who Made the Nation (1957), Mr. Wilson's War (1963), and Easter Island: Island of Enigmas (1971).

See T. Ludington, ed., The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos (1973); Dos Passos' autobiographical The Best Times (1967); biographies by T. Ludington (1980, repr. 1998) and V. S. Carr (1984); studies by L. W. Wagner (1979), M. Clark (1987), B. Maine, ed. (1988), L. Nanney (1998), and D. Harding (2003).

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15 of the Best Books and Articles on: John Dos Passos

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

John Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage » Read Now
by Barry Maine. 290 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set complements the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
2.

Dos Passos's Early Fiction, 1912-1938 » Read Now
by Michael Clark. 172 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
3.

U. S. A.: The 42nd Parallel; Nineteen Nineteen; The Big Money » Read Now
by John Dos Passos. 561 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Three Soldiers » Read Now
by John Dos Passos. 433 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

The Theme Is Freedom » Read Now
by John Dos Passos. 270 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
6.

John Dos Passos' Rosinante to the Road Again and the Modernist Expatriate Imagination, in Journal of Modern Literature » Read Now
by Donald Pizer. 14 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

Translating the Unknown Soldier: John Dos Passos and Blaise Cendrars in Monpazier, in Journal of Modern Literature » Read Now
by Jay Bochner. 18 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

Mimetic Desire in John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy, in Papers on Language & Literature » Read Now
by Matthew J. Packer. 16 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
9.

John Dos Passos, Blaise Cendrars and the "Other" Modernism, in Twentieth Century Literature » Read Now
by William Dow. 19 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
10.

Writing the City: Urban Visions & Literary Modernism (Chap. Five "Ulysses and Manhattan Transfer: A Poetics of Transatlantic Literary Modernism") » Read Now
by Desmond Harding. 224 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This work examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis, London-Paris-New York, that marks the intersection between western thinking about the City and the advent of literary modernism. Taking up the works of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, and drawing on a variety of interpretive...
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This work examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis, London-Paris-New York, that marks the intersection between western thinking about the City and the advent of literary modernism. Taking up the works of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, and drawing on a variety of interpretive strategies from literary criticism, social history, urban studies, sociology and cultural studies, Harding investigates the formation of a specifically Atlantic system of metropolitan identities and discourses.
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11.

American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology (Chap. 14 "John Dos Passos: Actuality Montage (The Real Event and the Speech of the People)") » Read Now
by Ronald E. Martin. 394 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library
12.

Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America (Chap. Two "Dos Passos Issues a Challenge: Can Language Make a Revolution?") » Read Now
by Laura Browder. 220 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

A reevaluation of American cultural politics in the 1930s
This interdisciplinary study blends textual analysis with social history to chart the intellectual and artistic ferment of Depression-era America. In Rousing the Nation, Laura Browder explores the fiction, drama, and film produced during the...
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A reevaluation of American cultural politics in the 1930s
This interdisciplinary study blends textual analysis with social history to chart the intellectual and artistic ferment of Depression-era America. In Rousing the Nation, Laura Browder explores the fiction, drama, and film produced during the decade by socially conscious intellectuals who struggled to create a uniquely American art. Challenged by a public more exposed to comic strips and tabloids than to serious artistic creativity, these writers and cinematographers used the techniques of modernism and muckraking to fashion works that would be experimental without being insular and would inspire the public to social activism.
Browder first considers authors James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos, arguing that their work successfully sparked a discussion about what it meant to be American at a time when the country's very future seemed in doubt. She then examines the Living Newspaper productions of the Federal Theatre Project, which brought politically and aesthetically provocative drama to twenty-five million Americans. In a final chapter, she examines social films of the period, focusing on Paramount's 1939 production of One-Third of a Nation.
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13.

Body & Soul: The Making of American Modernism (Chap. Three "John Dos Passos and the Physiology of the City") » Read Now
by Robert M. Crunden. 480 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

In this book Robert Crunden puts the "jazz" back in the Jazz Age. Jazz was America's greatest contribution to the Modernist movement, yet it is much overlooked. When we hear the term "Jazz Age", we conjure the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Eliot, not Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Ethel...
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In this book Robert Crunden puts the "jazz" back in the Jazz Age. Jazz was America's greatest contribution to the Modernist movement, yet it is much overlooked. When we hear the term "Jazz Age", we conjure the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Eliot, not Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. In order to correct this imbalance, Crunden re-introduces us to these musical luminaries who gave the era its name as he traces the early history of jazz from New Orleans to Chicago to New York.
While Crunden emphasizes music over literature and the visual arts, he never fails to map the complex cross-currents of literature that passed between jazz musicians and their "Lost Generation" peers, a veritable pageant of the glittering personalities of the day -- James Joyce, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein.
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14.

After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (Chap. V "Dos Passos: The Energy of Despair") » Read Now
by John W. Aldridge. 268 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...for Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos ; E. P. Dutton Co., Inc., for...Transfer and U.S.A. by John Dos Passos; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for...for First Encounter by John Dos...
15.

The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (Discussion of John Dos Passos begins on p. 45) » Read Now
by Caren Irr. 294 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library