John Dos Passos Books

"The 42nd Parallel," the first volume of John Dos Passos's "U.S.A." trilogy, is a novel about America and Americans from the 1890s up to the first World War. That sounds ordinary enough, but "The 42nd Parallel"--the title possibly refers to the latitude of Chicago, Dos Passos's city of birth and where a good portion of the action of the novel takes place--is notable more for its style than for its content, not that the latter is uninteresting. Dos Passos invents five young people from different backgrounds and parts of the country and follows the courses of their lives until their destinies eventually intersect.

The first to be introduced is a poor kid from Connecticut by way of Chicago named Fenian "Mac" McCreary who, starting out as an apprentice printer not unlike Benjamin Franklin, travels from city to city hopping trains and falling haplessly into a variety of odd jobs--assisting a con man, writing propaganda for a labor organization--until he ends up in Mexico running a bookstore on the fringe of a revolutionary movement. Then we meet Janey Williams, a middle-class girl from Washington, D.C., who makes a living as a stenographer while she is looking for a husband.

Next is a diligent, intelligent boy from Wilmington, Delaware, named J. Ward Moorehouse who after some bad luck in his career and his marriage becomes a successful public relations consultant for corporations. Eleanor Stoddard, a Chicago girl who dreams of a fashionable and cultured life for herself, breaks the social and economic barriers and becomes a highly reputable interior decorator in New York. Finally, Charley Anderson, a North Dakota native, struggles to find and keep work as a mechanic while he roams the country as a vagrant, ultimately volunteering for the ambulance corps in France as the United States enters the European war.

What all these people have in common is that they each epitomize some facet of the new American socioeconomic picture of the emerging twentieth century--the socialist, the working single girl, the corporate image softener. The novel reflects the changes America was undergoing at the time, especially in light of the problematic relations between labor, industry, and government, and the country's potential position as a new global superpower awaiting the biggest, bloodiest war the world would witness to date. Dos Passos wrote this in 1930, so of course he had the benefit of some hindsight; there was no second world war, nor even yet the threat of one, to obscure his vision of the era.

The narratives of the main characters alternate with "Newsreels" that provide glimpses of contemporary events, headlines, and snippets of popular songs; sections called "The Camera Eye" which record random prattle from snapshot subjects and look like modernist prose poems; and brief versified sketches of actual personalities and prominent figures of the day who shaped American history, from Eugene V. Debs to Thomas Edison to Charles Proteus Steinmetz. The novel is experimental in structure, but Dos Passos is breezily conversational in his prose, telling pure stories with natural drama; there is no unbelievable comedy or tragedy here, no sentimentality or jingoism, just life as it is lived.

This first part of Dos Passos' acclaimed "USA" trilogy takes the reader from the start of the 20th-century up to America's entry in World War I through the alternating life stories of five regular (white) citizens. Had he stopped there, the book might have been perfect, but modernist experimentations creep in through the "Newsreel" and "The Camera's Eye" sections and muddy up the work. These are kind of abstract prose collages or montages comprised of headlines, snatched phrases of songs, news clippings, and random phrases -- presumably intended to convey some of the mood and seeming frenetic pace of the time. The fourth element in his brew are brief sketches of notable figures of American history (some more familiar to contemporary readers than others), including Thomas Edison, "Gene" Debs, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Charles Steinmetz (pioneering electrical engineer) and more. However, if one can ignore all of Dos Passos' uneven futzing around with these various elements, there's quite a good social history underneath. When writing about his five core characters, he's very straightforward and proves to be an engaging storyteller.

Dos Passos uses his five characters to show the pre-war period as a time of great change in America, when the political field was still wide open and the opportunities for social mobility were a tangible lure to young people. Probably the closest to his heart is the first one we meet, a poor Irish-American apprentice printer from Connecticut named Mac. His picaresque adventures take him train-hopping around the country and into a turbulent Mexico, taking on odd jobs and working for the labor movement. Raised by Fenian rebels, he's a card carrying Wobbly and proud of it. The middle three characters are middle-class strivers. Janey is a Washington, DC stenographer whose halcyon days of youth end when her teen crush dies in a car wreck and her golden boy brother joins the merchant marine. Eleanor is a naive Chicago girl who is introduced into a "arty" set and eventually works her way up in the world to become a fashionable Manhattanite interior decorator. Both of these women's lives eventually intersect with that of J. Ward Moorehouse, an industrious Delaware boy who manages to latch on to a rich wife and leverages that to make a name for himself in advertising and public relations. A Minnesotan hick named Charley forms the working class bookend to the five characters. Like Mac, he wanders the country, living close the edge and picking up mechanic or carnival jobs where he can, and gets interested in the labor movement.

As the lives of these characters unfold over the decade and a half, we see the energetic face of modern America emerging. The rise and fall of unions, the rise of the working woman, the rise of advertising and media spin, the tension between government and the people, the rise of American hegemony and nationalism, and the inevitable class divide -- the one area that escapes major attention is race. Lest this sound rather dry and boring, the five characters go through personal and professional trials and tribulations familiar to our time. Playing an especially large role in the characters' lives are love and sex, the former generally playing out poorly, and the latter sordidly. There's an interesting tension that surfaces off and on through the lives of the male characters, in which females divert them from their avowed course. This is introduced very early in the book when Mac is warned by his father that he must stay away from women, because women will make you "sell out" and betray the revolution. The idea that a man can't be an effective revolutionary if he's got a woman to deal with is a recurring one -- which is not to say that women don't have their own problems throughout the story -- and it would be interesting to see a feminist analysis of the book. In any event, once you get used to the structure and style and concentrate on the core characters, it remains a very readable and important portrait of America's history from the perspective of a social revolutionary.

To read John Dos Passos' "The 42ND Parallel" is a unique reading experience that I highly recommend, though not to everybody. It is a great book, but very intellectual, slow and sometimes confusing --therefore it requires a lot of concentration from the reader. But those who adventure this superb work are likely to be very pleased. This is a great portrait of the USA circa 1900 --a remarkable read.

To begin with, the format of the story can be a major drawback. Not only is it segmented, but also, from time to time, sections that haven't much to do with the narrative itself pop up. Sections named "Newsreel" and "Camera Eye" may not make the main narrative --or narratives --move on, but they are important to set the mood and give historical background to the reader. They can put off the reader, or helpful, it only depends on how much one likes historical context.

Each main character is a book itself. They have long stories that are told from the beginning. Each one has his or her main conflicts, supporting characters and so forth. But the closer we get to the end, the clearer it is that all the storylines will get together in the end. And this is one of the biggest accomplishments of Dos Passos. Many writers try to do this kind of device and fail --they are neither convincer, nor surprising. But this is not the case in "The 42ND Parallel". You may have a feeling the narratives will eventually meet each other in the end, but the end is so engaging that surprises us.

Since "The 42ND Parallel" is the first installment of a trilogy, clearly, it has no ending so to speak. The narratives come to a finale, but still there is water to pass under the bridge. The last paragraph is the perfect hook for the next novel. It leaves the reader with a natural excitement to read "1919".

if you like On The Road by Jack Kerouac, than you'll love this trilogy.

When I first came across John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) as a teenager I thought they were the most exciting books I'd read to date. I was enthralled by its scope, its style, and its highly politicized substance. Dos Passos' montage-style (that seemed to be some sort of homage to the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein) mixed interwoven story lines of fictional characters with brief contemporary biographies of famous contemporaries. To that he added "newsreel" items, brief inserts from news clippings of the day that gave some sense of the cultural and political world these characters inhabited. Last, Dos Passos added subjective, autobiographical snippets (the "Camera Eye") that served as some sort of exterior voice of the author. I was concerned when I picked up 42nd Parallel many years later that I would find that my excitement was more the product of teenage naivete than from reading a truly unique literary work. Happily, I was not disappointed to find that the USA Trilogy remains for me, a wonderful piece of writing, one that has fallen inexplicably out of the American literary cannon.

Seventy years later we think of American fiction from the 1920s and 1930s as being dominated by three writers, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. It is not much remembered that at the time Dos Passos was thought of as an essential fourth. When 42nd Parallel was published Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Upon publication of The Big Money in 1936 Dos Passos made the cover of the August 10, 1936 issue of Time Magazine.

42nd Parallel is a wonderful title for Volume I of the Trilogy. The 42nd Parallel of latitude runs right through the heart of the USA. Starting from the west it forms the north/south boundary of California, Nevada and part of Utah from Oregon and Idaho. Running east it crosses Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and the New York/Pennsylvania border. After cutting across Connecticut it reaches the Atlantic Ocean just where the Pilgrims landed, at Plymouth Rock.

Dos Passos' 42nd Parallel cuts a similar swath across the USA. Set roughly in the years from 1900 to the First World War, Dos Passos traces the lives of five characters, each from a different part of the country and each with a different class and cultural background. We are presented with the stories of Fainy McCreary (Mac), Janey, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eleanor Stoddard, and Charley Anderson. As the stories progress they converge (personally or geographically) and diverge sometimes as randomly as two ships passing in the night. We have a range of characters from a card carrying member of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies) in Mac to a budding man of wealth and importance in the new field of public relations (Moorehouse). Some hop trains and tramp from town to town looking for jobs or social unrest. Others strive for respectability and try to make a `nice' middle class life for themselves.

In between chapters Dos Passos provides us with biographical sketches of famed Americans such as Thomas Edison, Bob La Follette, Andrew Carnegie, and Luther Burbank. Also interspersed throughout the book are the Newsreels and what Dos Passos called "The Camera Eye" made up of his own musings on his life and times. All of the fictional characters live for the moment and don't engage in any literary musings on the meaning of life and their role in it. The Camera Eye seems, in many respects, to consist of Dos Passos setting out his own interior life, something missing from his characters. 42nd Parallel is a politically charged piece of work and is fully representative of the highly charged and turbulent early years of the 20th-century.

By the time I was finished with the 42nd Parallel any qualms I had about revisiting Dos Passos had long since evaporated. I recommend this book to anyone who, like me, read the book many, many years ago. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who hasn't yet discovered The USA Trilogy. You won't be disappointed.

Those who came of age politically in the 1980s or later can hardly comprehend the influence Bill Buckley had on the modern conservative movement.

        He was, by far, the most attractive and thrilling conservative intellect for decades, and more than equal in debate to any liberal intellectual, as we learned on many occasions. Conservative students of my generation, confronted with an overwhelming liberal (and often unbearably smug) faculty, were greatly reassured by the knowledge that Buckley could smash the arguements of anyone on the liberal side.

        Though Up From Liberalism concerns itself largely with issues that date back to the sixties, the combination of humor and erudition Buckley uses to skewer the liberal establishment gives the book a timeless appeal.

It's probably Buckley that transformed the word `Liberal' from a misused label to an epithet. Needless to say, he well understands his own misuse of the word, which he justifies, rightly, on the basis of the fact that everyone misuses it. If everyone assumes a word means something, does the word not in fact come to mean that, no matter what linguists insist? In any case, as pleasant and amusing as this book is, it will win no converts, nor is it meant to. It is not a conservative manifesto that reaches out even to the undecided and implores them to join the conservative cause. It is not even a statement of purpose in the style Barry Goldwater's `Conscience Of A Conservative'. Rather, it is mind candy for the right. Buckley is first and foremost a wordsmith, a writer who says what he means and says it well. He is not an intellectual who understands and appreciates the arguments and viewpoints of his ideological foes; he is a relentless eloquent partisan. His intent is to present his own side, in as a biased a way as possible, and make fools of his foes by exposing the weakness of their arguments and ignoring the strengths. At this, he is a master. He is also, of course, a master writer, whether you agree with Buckley or not you will appreciate his wit, his candor and his style. Indeed, even when he has nothing to say he says it so well that it is enjoyable to read.

I'm a college student studying on a liberal college campus who will probably pursue a career in Constitutional law. Reading this book has helped me understand my political philosophy much more clearly. Up From Liberalism by William F. Buckley, Jr. is a witty, sagacious, and very perceptive book declaring the fresh conservative alternative to liberal establishment politics. It is a must read for anyone really serious about being a political conservative. Although most of Buckley's comments are referring to past political history in the 40's and 50's, it helps one understand the ideological battle that has been raging for years in the political spectrum. Sparkling with humour and intellectual fun, Buckley quickly dispatches of his opponents' ideas with the ease of a master swordsman. This book is still valuable to read because the philosophy of liberals today hasn't really changed. To them, Government is still the answer to all of our problems. If you are a liberal, reading this book will help you understand the arguments against your position. If you are a conservative, this book will give you enjoyment, but also valid logical proof of why one should believe in limited government. I hope that everyone even slightly interested in politics reads this book.

Learn to think; stop regurgitating.
I am quite fond of this book, although Buckley has written and continues to write words of great elucidation. This one has been most formative for me. It is dated in its references, but the thought process and basis for reasoning is tried and true. Highly recommended for young people; especially those who consider themselves to be in one place or another politically, but are not entirely sure of the logic behind their beliefs, and would like to begin the journey of becoming a homo sapien.

It seems almost impossible that John Dos Passos has slid into anonymity--his considerable literary reputation once rivaled that of his close friend and drinking buddy, Ernest Hemingway--but few readers today recognize him at all. Part of a trilogy that he published in 1932, entitled, "USA," ("The 42nd Parallel," and "The Big Money") "Nineteen Nineteen" is a novel of extraordinary historical sweep and stylistic craft. Dos Passos was influenced by the great experimental genius of James Joyce's "Ulysses," a novel that revolutionized fictional narration. Using several experimental techniques, fictional and non-fictional biographies, a poetic, stream of conscious voice entitled, "The Camera Eye," and a cinematic-montage technique that Dos Passos called, "Newsreels," this novel sweeps a decade's events from 1910 to 1919. The middle novel of the trilogy, "Nineteen Nineteen" traces historical events, particularly the devastating results of World War I, and individuals caught-up in the gigantic forces that reshaped the 20th Century. His historical portraits, or biographies, of Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Joe Hill, and Woodrow Wilson combine with his stunning fictional, almost Dickensian, characters like a sailor named, Joe Williams, a rich, Harvard kid, named Richard Ellsworth Savage, or an idealistic woman, Eveline Hutchins, who finds the inexorable forces of war and economic power inescapable and ruinous. These accounts are told with a tone of satiric irony and bittersweet fatalism. The novel remains, despite its neglected status, one of the great achievements of American literature despite its flawed politics. Dos Passos began a devoted socialist, convinced that capitalism had both caused and profited from the war. Later in his career, particularly in a 1950's trilogy entitled, "Mid-Century," Dos Passos repudiated his left-wing sympathies for a turn to the political right. In spite of these ideological trappings, he remains, along with William Faulkner, one of the most significant exponents of experimental fiction in America over the past millenium.

It seems almost impossible that John Dos Passos has slid into anonymity--his considerable literary reputation once rivaled that of his close friend and drinking buddy, Ernest Hemingway--but few readers today recognize him at all. Part of a trilogy that he published in 1932, entitled, "USA," ("The 42nd Parallel," and "The Big Money") "Nineteen Nineteen" is a novel of extraordinary historical sweep and stylistic craft. Dos Passos was influenced by the great experimental genius of James Joyce's "Ulysses," a novel that revolutionized fictional narration. Using several experimental techniques, fictional and non-fictional biographies, a poetic, stream of conscious voice entitled, "The Camera Eye," and a cinematic-montage technique that Dos Passos called, "Newsreels," this novel sweeps a decade's events from 1910 to 1919. The middle novel of the trilogy, "Nineteen Nineteen" traces historical events, particularly the devastating results of World War I, and individuals caught-up in the gigantic forces that reshaped the 20th Century. His historical portraits, or biographies, of Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Joe Hill, and Woodrow Wilson combine with his stunning fictional, almost Dickensian, characters like a sailor named, Joe Williams, a rich, Harvard kid, named Richard Ellsworth Savage, or an idealistic woman, Eveline Hutchins, who finds the inexorable forces of war and economic power inescapable and ruinous. These accounts are told with a tone of satiric irony and bittersweet fatalism. The novel remains, despite its neglected status, one of the great achievements of American literature despite its flawed politics. Dos Passos began a devoted socialist, convinced that capitalism had both caused and profited from the war. Later in his career, particularly in a 1950's trilogy entitled, "Mid-Century," Dos Passos repudiated his left-wing sympathies for a turn to the political right. In spite of these ideological trappings, he remains, along with William Faulkner, one of the most significant exponents of experimental fiction in America over the past millenium.

I have not read this book yet, but it won the 1999 Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars, a great honor.

I think my mom's the best writer at Amazon.com. Everyone should buy this book!

Collecting fiction from three wars is a big order, but selecting the erudite F. van Wyck Mason to do the job has paid off. I read into the night, because I never knew what was coming next -- the "many faces of war" sounds trite -- in this compilation of fright, hate, unexpected humor, and confrontation with death.
I never found a conflict in facts as compared to non-fiction sources. The selected writers (John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, Leon Uris, Leo Rosten,Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, William Brinkley Theodore H. White, James Clavell, Rod Serling, and many others) obviously took their time to get it right.

Have you ever wondered why two people get together? Why does "true love", if there is such a thing, happen? That's the question posed and answered by this novel. When two people, any two people, fall in love, they bring together their history, their lives and everything and everyone they have ever been. That's what John Dos Passos has written. Not the love story itself. That happens but is not the central set of events in the book. Instead, he has brought together everything that has happened to the two lovers, their parents and their country, everything that has made them the people they are, that makes them, inevitably, lovers.

I compare the 1984 printing of Carr's biography to the other standard study by Townsend Ludington; I do not think that Carr's recent reprinting substantially differs in the body of the contents from the original edition. It appears a preface has been added by Donald Pizer to the paperback.

Townsend Ludington's 1980 and Virginia Spencer Carr's 1984 volumes weigh in about the same, over five hundred pages of closely printed text. I have the hardcovers, although both biographies have appeared in paperback reprints, Ludington's a decade ago and Carr a few years back. Despite his earlier works being edited by Ludington in three handsome installments in the Library of America series in the past few years, even these languish, absent even from the giant city libraries near me. Outside of nods to the USA trilogy or maybe "Manhattan Transfer" or in a pinch, "Three Soldiers," not many readers bother with him.

Conventional wisdom, shared even by his admirers, tends to denigrate his later novels and histories and biographies, after his gradual embrace of "middle-class liberalism" after his disillusionment with the manipulation of the Left by Stalinists in the 1920s and 1930s. None of his works remain in print which were written after his fall from favor with the Left. The Library of America selections span the twenties and thirties, and it's for his rendering of the ideas, events, and trends of the first three decades of the last century that Dos Passos will be remembered. Like many writers who outlasted their early impact and kept at it, he resented being labelled the "USA" author forty years later, but without this contribution to American literature, there'd be no pair of hefty biographies on my shelf or any other that matter over a century after his birth.

Few today may read Dos Passos, at least in America, but as with Jack London, Upton Sinclair, or James T. Farrell, this one time literary lion of the Left inspired many in Europe and the Third World with his chronicles that mingled a Camera Eye of the passing scene, a mordant Newsreel span of current events from the Wilson-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years, and meticulously observed, if often distant and mechanical, scurryings of individuals as they resisted the machinations of "competitive Capital," "Monopoly Capital," and the triumph of the Organization Man, with "the big money."

Ludington gains the edge over Carr for his diligent incorporation of Dos Passos' correspondence, which he corrected from its previous printing as the collected letters. Carr earns her merit by adding the letters to DP, from his agent Bernice Baumgartner, his first wife Katy, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and others who hated and loved DP. Ludington tends to concentrate more on DP's own career; Carr expands to notice, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald complaining to Max Perkins about sales of "Tender is the Night" vs. "1919," or Edmund Wilson's sangfroid in his letters vs. his astonishing poverty at one point.

Neither biographer gives much notice to the actual works. Ludington's masterful comparison of the real event that DP reported on vs. its transformation as the "Body of an American" section in USA that covered the selection of one of four bodies for the WWI representative of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier remains an anomaly. He tends to cite a few reviews of each work after a brief paragraph or two summarizing each DP book as it was issued. Carr adds more context and often quotes a far greater range of positive and negative reviews for each work, but she rarely offers her own judgment of the work at hand.

Ludington stresses, as his subtitle emphasizes, the "odyssey" intellectually and politically that DP made over the century. You understand his opposition to technocrats, centralized power, and elite planners who conspire to ruin liberty and crush self-government, according to DP's constant resentment. You also understand, against the frequent criticism of his fiction, why DP relies on cliché and cant. He strives to make you listen to the truckdriver, the lobbyist, the ad-man, the gladhander, or the idealist who walked among us once, especially in an era before TV managed to empower the spin doctors and when radio or film could spend their own charms trying to sway the masses. His characters, from "Manhattan Transfer" on, remain less lovable and more caricatured than those created by his peers, but DP meant to use them as true satirists do, as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," to highlight the shortcomings and exaggerate the ambitions that ordinary folks harbored.

Ludington sums up DP's "lover's quarrel with the world." (507) You appreciate how he could go from marching for miners in Harlan County or against the conviction of Sacco & Vanzetti to sharing a stage with John Wayne, if not Strom Thurmond! He stubbornly, as Ludington documents, sought the ideal of Jefferson's gentleman farmer-- especially after inheriting his father's plantations on the Potomac-- while somehow having to live hand-to-mouth for years, borrowing from his friends constantly, writing incessantly, and travelling studiously as a free-lance journalist in war and peacetime, home and abroad, always talking to whomever he met, thinking and listening just as carefully. Ludington, more than Carr, shows how far this habitual stance of self-reliance could take him, into dangerous support at one time of Joe McCarthy, such were his distrusts of American weakness against his former Communist cabal. Dos Passos kept warning his audience, however much it dwindled, of the dangers of power when concentrated into the hands of a few, no matter their rhetoric of inclusion.

Carr depicts DP as a coach on the sidelines, a fellow-traveller at times but not a party man by nature. The artist Adolph Dehn said of him, even at DP's most radical stage in 1928: "One sees better if one sits on the fence." (qtd. 235) The Left idolized him and then excommunicated him, but DP, as both biographers realize, lacked the credulity to follow any leader. This outsider aura began in his days as an illegitimate son of a wealthy capitalist and his long-time mistress, to his gawky status at Choate, and his aesthetic posing at Harvard-- this stint's richly detailed by Carr). He hated war, but wished to see it. This led to his ambulance-driving volunteer duty in the French trenches of 1917, which sparked his wish to both save the world for the little man and resist any program or power that would in doing this crush the freedom he learned increasingly to admire as the American contribution. This led, as Ludington explains with more evidence than Carr, to his distrust of both sides as they mouthed democracy in the Cold War, to his advocacy of Goldwater, and his impatience with hippies and the New Left on the campuses where he lectured before his death in 1970.

Determined to champion the common man even as he became the country squire his father longed to be, in his temperament he stayed his own man, infuriating more than he inspired as the decades went on. In the thick of ideological allegiance, as the Communist Party in the U.S. courted DP, he remained a refusenik. He sided with "the scavengers and campfollowers." (qtd. Carr 299) He agreed in 1932, as did most of his peers, that the American system was doomed to inevitable failure and collapse. But, while the capitalist failure loomed in the Depression as obvious, he could not discern any collapse. A plutocracy appeared to him more likely to spring from American soil than a Red dictatorship of the proletariat. Seventy-five years later, post-Cold War, it seems that Dos Passos' prediction has long come to pass!

Both academics draw on his widow's and daughter's permission to use the archives, and while Carr adds a few reminiscences from his family, Ludington uses his earlier editing of his letters to enrich his study. I assume both scholars worked in the same time, the 1970s, on their works, and although my back-to-back perusal of both uncovers the same content carefully sifted, each has its advantages. Carr gives more of the flavor of his times. She's superb on conveying Harvard during WWI, DP's courage as he rescued the wounded under fire, and the background of the Spanish conflict. You understand more his relationship with both his wives and his children, and the tensions that his commitment to living off others' generosity as he determined to make it as a writer created in his friendships and his family. Ludington probes into his mental evolution as he challenged leftist orthodoxy, and how he grew into a more consistent, organic, and daring critic of both D.C. and the Kremlin, the fat cats on both sides of the Iron Curtain, than the stereotype of an addled right-wing convert that many disappointed critics continued to peddle in the media for the three dozen productive years after he returned from Spain and challenged liberal platitudes with what he struggled to see as the sinister truth.

Both scholars inevitably repeat much of the same detail in this man's seven-and-a-half decades of a life spent as what Time magazine a bit clunkily but typically phrased it, in an echo of Dos Passos' own style, a "champion of the individual, an implacable foe of organized Bigness." But, after learning much from a two-time plunge into Dos Passos' life and his career, largely from primary sources well annotated by both professors, one can then return to not only Dos Passos' essays and fiction in print, but an intrepid reader may seek out the other works that languish in the rarely visited holdings of a few libraries today. Dos Passos, as you will agree after these two biographies have been finished, deserves for a full understanding of his defense of the individual against the political machine and the bureaucratic system, a careful study of his many writings, for which Carr and Ludington at least give if not in-depth criticism of their own, then at least a reminder of what awaits the few who delve off the path of conventional thinking from left or right, as he searched for himself.

P.S. See also Stephen Koch's 2005 study of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the break of the two men over the murder by Communists of DP's old friend Jose Robles in 1937.

Townsend Ludington's 1980 and Virginia Spencer Carr's 1984 volumes weigh in about the same, over five hundred pages of closely printed text. (Carr's has recently been reprinted with a preface by Donald Pizer; the body of her text does not appear to have been altered substantially.) I have the hardcovers, although both biographies have appeared in paperback reprints, Ludington's a decade ago and Carr a few years back. Despite his earlier works being edited by Ludington in three handsome installments in the Library of America series in the past few years, even these languish, absent even from the giant city libraries near me. Outside of nods to the USA trilogy or maybe "Manhattan Transfer" or in a pinch, "Three Soldiers," not many readers bother with him.

Conventional wisdom, shared even by his admirers, tends to denigrate his later novels and histories and biographies, after his gradual embrace of "middle-class liberalism" after his disillusionment with the manipulation of the Left by Stalinists in the 1920s and 1930s. None of his works remain in print which were written after his fall from favor with the Left. The Library of America selections span the twenties and thirties, and it's for his rendering of the ideas, events, and trends of the first three decades of the last century that Dos Passos will be remembered. Like many writers who outlasted their early impact and kept at it, he resented being labelled the "USA" author forty years later, but without this contribution to American literature, there'd be no pair of hefty biographies on my shelf or any other that matter over a century after his birth.

Few today may read Dos Passos, at least in America, but as with Jack London, Upton Sinclair, or James T. Farrell, this one time literary lion of the Left inspired many in Europe and the Third World with his chronicles that mingled a Camera Eye of the passing scene, a mordant Newsreel span of current events from the Wilson-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years, and meticulously observed, if often distant and mechanical, scurryings of individuals as they resisted the machinations of "competitive Capital," "Monopoly Capital," and the triumph of the Organization Man, with "the big money."

Ludington gains the edge over Carr for his diligent incorporation of Dos Passos' correspondence, which he corrected from its previous printing as the collected letters. Carr earns her merit by adding the letters to DP, from his agent Bernice Baumgartner, his first wife Katy, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and others who hated and loved DP. Ludington tends to concentrate more on DP's own career; Carr expands to notice, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald complaining to Max Perkins about sales of "Tender is the Night" vs. "1919," or Edmund Wilson's sangfroid in his letters vs. his astonishing poverty at one point.

Neither biographer gives much notice to the actual works. Ludington's masterful comparison of the real event that DP reported on vs. its transformation as the "Body of an American" section in USA that covered the selection of one of four bodies for the WWI representative of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier remains an anomaly. He tends to cite a few reviews of each work after a brief paragraph or two summarizing each DP book as it was issued. Carr adds more context and often quotes a far greater range of positive and negative reviews for each work, but she rarely offers her own judgment of the work at hand.

Ludington stresses, as his subtitle emphasizes, the "odyssey" intellectually and politically that DP made over the century. You understand his opposition to technocrats, centralized power, and elite planners who conspire to ruin liberty and crush self-government, according to DP's constant resentment. You also understand, against the frequent criticism of his fiction, why DP relies on cliché and cant. He strives to make you listen to the truckdriver, the lobbyist, the ad-man, the gladhander, or the idealist who walked among us once, especially in an era before TV managed to empower the spin doctors and when radio or film could spend their own charms trying to sway the masses. His characters, from "Manhattan Transfer" on, remain less lovable and more caricatured than those created by his peers, but DP meant to use them as true satirists do, as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," to highlight the shortcomings and exaggerate the ambitions that ordinary folks harbored.

Ludington sums up DP's "lover's quarrel with the world." (507) You appreciate how he could go from marching for miners in Harlan County or against the conviction of Sacco & Vanzetti to sharing a stage with John Wayne, if not Strom Thurmond! He stubbornly, as Ludington documents, sought the ideal of Jefferson's gentleman farmer-- especially after inheriting his father's plantations on the Potomac-- while somehow having to live hand-to-mouth for years, borrowing from his friends constantly, writing incessantly, and travelling studiously as a free-lance journalist in war and peacetime, home and abroad, always talking to whomever he met, thinking and listening just as carefully. Ludington, more than Carr, shows how far this habitual stance of self-reliance could take him, into dangerous support at one time of Joe McCarthy, such were his distrusts of American weakness against his former Communist cabal. Dos Passos kept warning his audience, however much it dwindled, of the dangers of power when concentrated into the hands of a few, no matter their rhetoric of inclusion.

Carr depicts DP as a coach on the sidelines, a fellow-traveller at times but not a party man by nature. The artist Adolph Dehn said of him, even at DP's most radical stage in 1928: "One sees better if one sits on the fence." (qtd. 235) The Left idolized him and then excommunicated him, but DP, as both biographers realize, lacked the credulity to follow any leader. This outsider aura began in his days as an illegitimate son of a wealthy capitalist and his long-time mistress, to his gawky status at Choate, and his aesthetic posing at Harvard-- this stint's richly detailed by Carr). He hated war, but wished to see it. This led to his ambulance-driving volunteer duty in the French trenches of 1917, which sparked his wish to both save the world for the little man and resist any program or power that would in doing this crush the freedom he learned increasingly to admire as the American contribution. This led, as Ludington explains with more evidence than Carr, to his distrust of both sides as they mouthed democracy in the Cold War, to his advocacy of Goldwater, and his impatience with hippies and the New Left on the campuses where he lectured before his death in 1970.

Determined to champion the common man even as he became the country squire his father longed to be, in his temperament he stayed his own man, infuriating more than he inspired as the decades went on. In the thick of ideological allegiance, as the Communist Party in the U.S. courted DP, he remained a refusenik. He sided with "the scavengers and campfollowers." (qtd. Carr 299) He agreed in 1932, as did most of his peers, that the American system was doomed to inevitable failure and collapse. But, while the capitalist failure loomed in the Depression as obvious, he could not discern any collapse. A plutocracy appeared to him more likely to spring from American soil than a Red dictatorship of the proletariat. Seventy-five years later, post-Cold War, it seems that Dos Passos' prediction has long come to pass!

Both academics draw on his widow's and daughter's permission to use the archives, and while Carr adds a few reminiscences from his family, Ludington uses his earlier editing of his letters to enrich his study. I assume both scholars worked in the same time, the 1970s, on their works, and although my back-to-back perusal of both uncovers the same content carefully sifted, each has its advantages. Carr gives more of the flavor of his times. She's superb on conveying Harvard during WWI, DP's courage as he rescued the wounded under fire, and the background of the Spanish conflict. You understand more his relationship with both his wives and his children, and the tensions that his commitment to living off others' generosity as he determined to make it as a writer created in his friendships and his family. Ludington probes into his mental evolution as he challenged leftist orthodoxy, and how he grew into a more consistent, organic, and daring critic of both D.C. and the Kremlin, the fat cats on both sides of the Iron Curtain, than the stereotype of an addled right-wing convert that many disappointed critics continued to peddle in the media for the three dozen productive years after he returned from Spain and challenged liberal platitudes with what he struggled to see as the sinister truth.

Both scholars inevitably repeat much of the same detail in this man's seven-and-a-half decades of a life spent as what Time magazine a bit clunkily but typically phrased it, in an echo of Dos Passos' own style, a "champion of the individual, an implacable foe of organized Bigness." But, after learning much from a two-time plunge into Dos Passos' life and his career, largely from primary sources well annotated by both professors, one can then return to not only Dos Passos' essays and fiction in print, but an intrepid reader may seek out the other works that languish in the rarely visited holdings of a few libraries today. Dos Passos, as you will agree after these two biographies have been finished, deserves for a full understanding of his defense of the individual against the political machine and the bureaucratic system, a careful study of his many writings, for which Carr and Ludington at least give if not in-depth criticism of their own, then at least a reminder of what awaits the few who delve off the path of conventional thinking from left or right, as he searched for himself.

P.S. See also Stephen Koch's 2005 study of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the break of the two men over the murder by Communists of DP's old friend Jose Robles in 1937.

This is an extremely interesting account of Dos Passo's visit to the Island in the mid-1970's. He also delves into a great amount of history surrounding the discovery, settlement, and ultimate downfall of the mysterious civilization that once inhabited the Island. I would definitely recommend reading this book before you travel there, since it provides you with some very interesting background on the Island that you are likely not to learn anywhere else. Even if you do not plan on traveling there but just enjoy reading about adventures in the South Pacific, this book is for you! Enjoy!

Nanney is able to dissect the personality of Dos Passos extraordinarily well. In addition, her writing style has become a favorite of mine. I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in Dos Passos, as well as those who are interested in American Studies in general.