1896-1970
Unlike Yezierska or Gold, John Dos Pssos was the son of a famous Wall Street lawyer. He toured Europe and attended Harvard where he became first an aesthete and the a political rebel. In 1917, he went to France as a volunteer ambulance driver. The brutality, lies, and meaningless suffering of the war proved to play a major role in his development, making him more of a radical and driving him further from the world his father represented. His first work, Three Soldiers was an attack on the army.
In 1925, Dos Passos published an experimental novel entitled Manhatten Transfer in which the only protagonsit is Manhattan itself. The point of view shifts between dozens of characters, giving hundreds of fragments of lives, but not focusing on any single person.
In the years following the publication of that work, Dos Passos became increasingly involved in left-wing causes. He wrote for a leftist journal, worked with the radical New Playwrights Theatre, was involved in the defense of two Italian-American anarchists accused of murder, and was involved in a 1931 miners' strike in Kentucky. During this time, Dos Passos wrote the trilogy U.S.A.
Perhaps his best work, U.S.A. reflected his deepening radicalsim by experimenting in the technical aspects of writing. The story consisted of biographies, actual newspaper headlines, song lyrics, politcal speeches, advertisements, and stream-of-consciousness sections interspersed with twelve narratives.
In the late 1930's, Dos Passos began rejecting his radical political views for extremely conservative ones. His writing also changed, becoming more traditional in his second trilogy, District of Columbia, which he published in 1952. He continued writing novels and histories, including a biography of Thomas Jefferson. In 1961, he published Midcentury, which copied the form of U.S.A., but had none of its power. This novel attacked unions, psychoanalysis, teenagers, and others in a very petulant way.
from U.S.A.: The Body of an American
This section of Dos Passos' first trilogy, U.S.A., a reader gets a very clear view of the experimentation that he excercised at the height of his career. This section is a stream-of -conscious piece where words and sentances are run together, and there does not seem to be a concrete character or plot. The first period does not appear until the middle of the fourth paragraph, and at times, the sentances consist of simply a list of different kinds of people.
Despite the difficulty one finds in reading the dis-jointed paragraphs, there is a definite theme. This is an anti-military, anti-war theme. Dispersed through the confusion, there is the story of John Doe, the name he gives to the soldier in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He comments on the racism that exists in the military, and how the government so coldly can put someone's bones into a grave without understanding the cruelties of war.
It is very obvious that this section was greatly influenced by his experiences in France as an ambulance driver. His view of Ameica is a rather dark and cynical one. Despite this, and despite the radical style, it is a very compelling work to read, and holds the readers attention, perhaps because of its unusual style.
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