John Dos Passos was born on January 14, 1896, in Chicago, Illinois, the son of John Randolph Dos Passos, a wealthy attorney, and Lucy Spriggs Madison. His parents were not married, and Dos Passos spent most of his youth traveling throughout Europe and the United States with his mother; he later recalled having "a hotel childhood." He graduated from Harvard University in 1916 and served in the ambulance corps during World War I. His first novel, One Man's Initiation: 1917, was published in 1917, but his writing didn't receive widespread attention until the publication of his second novel, Three Soldiers (1921), which was based on his war experiences and intended to present a truthful portrayal of the horrors of war rather than the glorified, romanticized images other writers had provided.

He followed this with Manhattan Transfer (1925) and then began writing the massive U.S.A., a trilogy intended to give readers a...