The reputation of the American novelist John Roderigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) is based chiefly on his early work, especially the trilogy "U.S.A." John Dos Passos was born in Chicago on Jan. 14, 1896, the illegitimate son of a noted New York lawyer, John R...

For readers familiar with his work in the 1920s and 1930s, John Dos Passos's public image seemed clearly defined. His friends and colleagues were expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, experimental dramatists such as John Howard/Lawson, and moderni...

For readers in the 1930s and 1940s the career of John Dos Passos had its puzzling aspects, but the image of the man seemed to possess a certain clarity. He was, according to the dust jackets, "Chicago-born," hence another of the mid-western realists, a r...

The Big Money - John Dos Passos - 1936 Introduction John Dos Passos's The Big Money (1936) argues that the pursuit of the American dream ends in corruption. No matter what good intentions the characters possess, the desire for big money...

The U.S.A. Trilogy is the major work of American writer John Dos Passos, comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936). The three books were first published together as a one-volume edition in 1938,...

The fact has to be faced that in his later fiction John Dos Passos is a failing novelist rather than a novelist of failure: a failing novelist largely because he has ceased to be an effective novelist of failure. It is scarcely possible to believe that the author of USA is producing books of which none is a vitalising pleasure to understand and evaluate, but it is true. Worse still, he is a writer whose deficiencies are no longer enlightening objects of critical attention, but one whose art is radically wea...

[An] attitude of determined omniscience informs all of U.S.A., even the biographical sections. Of the five historical personages who were still alive when Dos Passos wrote about them, none retains any control over his own destiny; that privilege is reserved for the abstract forces of history conceived under the aegis of Marxist-Veblenian determinism. The biography of Thomas Edison is oblique in emphasis; its subject, discussed in the past tense, is unable to free himself from his obsolete and socially dange...

In U.S.A., Dos Passos uses four "forms" or "frames," each of them deriving directly from his representative intention, his desire to get at the truth about his time with any available instrument…. There is the camera eye, an intermittent sequence of prose poems in an impressionist style…. The writing takes on the lyricism of a quasi-Joycean stream-of-consciousness and the emphasis is almost always upon the look and feel of things, mostly apart from any narrative con...