In the following essay, Levin discusses the political beliefs of John Dos Passos, particularly in U.S.A.

Although Dos Passos' writing eventually focused on American themes, his earliest poetry and fiction were more self-conscious than country-conscious. His favorite protagonist was a young, well-educated naif—usually a Brahmin—hungering for all experience simultaneously. There was much fascination with women, with sex (although never explicit), and with travel, all described through a romantic haze of impressionist color. There was also a strong sense of rootlessness, and the most carefull...

[Dos Passos'] preparation as a writer may be seen as four separate rites of passage, subjection to major ordeals of mind and spirit, which determined and tempered his view of the world and therefore the nature of his art. He had, first of all, to come to grips with the actualities of life in the United States, from which he was isolated by the unusual circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Beyond that, World War I was to him a genuine initiation, a quick—and safe—plunge into the str...

[We] have now had more than twenty years to digest Manhattan Transfer and fully ten years to come to terms with the completed trilogy of U.S.A. In books like Journeys between Wars, The Ground We Stand On, and State of the Nation, Dos Passos has exhibited his personal outlook upon the world, furnishing us the context in which to consider his "dramatic" representations of life. We should now be in a position to challenge this figure and ask ourselves what and how great is his significance for li...

The reader of Dos Passos … is not required to have much more reading agility than the reader of the daily press. Nor does Dos Passos make many more serious demands than a good movie. And this is said not to belittle an excellent writer who has much to offer, but to draw attention to the extreme simplification to which Dos Passos has submitted the early work of James Joyce. Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U. S. A. (1930–36) would not exist in their present form but for the ...

The special technique of The Big Money encompasses an entire, implicit metaphysic—the challenge of Being. It is important for another reason, too: thanks to this technique, Dos Passos's trilogy has a temporal structure. The several individual stories composing the trilogy, which are what one is first aware of, are not only different shots of a single reality but moments within a single development. This single development transcends each of them and exists only by virtue of the complex design ...

A novel is a mirror. So everyone says. But what is meant by reading a novel? It means, I think, jumping into the mirror. You suddenly find yourself on the other side of the glass, among people and objects that have a familiar look. But they merely look familiar. We have never really seen them. The things of our world have, in turn, become outside reflections. You close the book, step over the edge of the mirror and return to this honest-to-goodness world, and you find furniture, gardens and people who have ...

John Dos Passos is one of the few living American writers who is a world figure. Abroad, his books are sometimes cited as criticisms of American capitalism and as novels which expose American claims and propaganda. At home, Dos Passos is now regarded by some of his former admirers as a man who has made a complete turn, and has abandoned liberalism for the extreme right; he has gone from The New Republic to The National Review. In consequence, he is regretfully considered as writing in a state of rigor morti...

After Manhattan Transfer (1927) one remembered the name of John Dos Passos. After The Forty-second Parallel one looked eagerly forward to the succeeding members of the trilogy (for something of that order seemed to be promised) in the conviction that we had here a work demanding serious attention as no other appearing under the head of the novel during the past two or three years had done. Nineteen-nineteen is a challenge to justify the conviction. The Forty-second Parallel established Mr. Dos Passos as an ...