Three Plays: The Garbage Man, Airways, Inc., Fortune Heights
1934
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
A Pushcart at the Curb
1922
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Rosinante to the Road Again
1922
Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreign-Born Workmen
1927
Orient Express
1927
In All Countries
1934
The Villages Are the Heart of Spain
1938
Journeys Between Wars
1938
The Ground We Stand On
1941
State of the Nation
1944
Tour of Duty
1946
The Prospect Before Us
1950
The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson
1954
The Theme Is Freedom
1956
The Men Who Made the Nation
1957
Prospects of a Golden Age
1959
Mr. Wilson’s War
1962
Brazil on the Move
1963
Occasions and Protests
1964
Thomas Jefferson: The Making of a President
1964
The Best Times: An Informal Memoir
1966
The Shackles of Power: Three Jeffersonian Decades
1966
The Portugal Story: Three Centuries of Exploration and Discovery
1969
Easter Island: Island of Enigmas
1971
The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos
1973
About John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos (14 January 1896 to 28 September 1970) was an American novelist, best known for the “U.S.A.” trilogy: “The 42nd Parallel” (1930), “1919” (1932) and “The Big Money” (1936). Usually counted among the Lost Generation writers, he also wrote travel books, history, plays and poetry, and painted throughout his life.
He was born in Chicago, the son of the lawyer John Randolph Dos Passos and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison, and spent much of his childhood travelling in Europe with his mother. He was educated at the Choate School and at Harvard, where he became friends with E. E. Cummings, and graduated in 1916. In 1917 he sailed to France to join the Norton-Harjes ambulance corps, and he later served as a private in the United States Army Medical Corps.
The war gave him his first two books. “One Man’s Initiation: 1917” appeared in 1920, and the anti-war novel “Three Soldiers” (1921) brought him wide recognition. “Manhattan Transfer” (1925), a novel of New York City life that used stream-of-consciousness techniques, was a commercial success.
“U.S.A.” covers the first three decades of the twentieth century in four interleaved modes: the fictional life stories of twelve characters, “Newsreel” collages of newspaper clippings and song lyrics, short biographies of public figures such as Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford, and autobiographical “Camera Eye” passages. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked it 23rd among the best English-language novels of the century.
Dos Passos campaigned against the death sentences of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, but his experiences in Spain during the Civil War, including the killing of his friend and translator José Robles, turned him against the Communist movement and ended his friendship with Ernest Hemingway. His later fiction includes the “District of Columbia” trilogy and “Midcentury” (1961), which became a bestseller, and he wrote histories such as “The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson” (1954). A car crash in 1947 killed his first wife, Katy, and cost him an eye. He received the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in Rome in 1967 and died in Baltimore. His unfinished last novel, “Century’s Ebb”, was published in 1975.
