John Dos Passos

American · 1896 to 1970

Born John Roderigo Dos Passos on January 14, 1896, in Chicago, the illegitimate son of a powerful corporate lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent and a Virginia widow who travelled constantly with her son to keep the scandal at a distance, he grew up under the name John Madison and was not formally acknowledged by his father until he was sixteen. His parents arranged a six-month grand tour with a private tutor through France, Italy, Greece, and southwest Asia before they sent him to Choate and then to Harvard, where he graduated cum laude in 1916 alongside his friend e. e. cummings. He volunteered as an ambulance driver in Paris and Italy during the First World War, and the experience became Three Soldiers (1921), the antiwar novel that first brought him notice. Manhattan Transfer (1925) introduced the kaleidoscopic montage technique he would extend into the U.S.A. Trilogy, three novels stitching together fictional lives, newsreels, biographies, and stream-of-consciousness Camera Eye passages to take the temperature of a country. He campaigned for Sacco and Vanzetti, travelled to Stalin's Russia in 1928, and broke with the Communist left in Spain after his friend José Robles was murdered there, a rupture that ended his friendship with Ernest Hemingway. By the 1960s he was canvassing for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. He painted his own book jackets in a modernist idiom learned in Paris from Fernand Léger and Blaise Cendrars. He died on September 28, 1970, in Baltimore, Maryland, at the age of seventy-four, and was buried at Spence's Point, the Virginia estate his father had once owned.