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John Roderigo Dos Passos 1896–1970, American novelist, b. Chicago, grad. Harvard, 1916. His first successful novel, Three Soldiers (1921), belonged to the group of socially conscious novels of disillusionment that appeared after World War I. With Manhattan Transfer (1925) his major creative period began. Intertwining accounts of a succession of unrelated characters, this novel presents a composite picture of the meaninglessness and decadence of the life of the typical New Yorker of the early 1920s. In his finest achievement, the trilogy U.S.A. (1937), composed of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), he developed the kaleidoscopic technique of Manhattan Transfer; by skillfully weaving together narration, stream of consciousness, biographies of representative figures, and quotations from newspapers and magazines, Dos Passos presented the first three decades of the 20th cent. in America. After U.S.A. the radical left-wing views that strongly colored his earlier works gave way to a conservative social philosophy. In his second trilogy, District of Columbia (1952), which includes Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949), he defends many of the principles he had previously criticized. In general, his later works lack the power and cohesion of his earlier novels, although Midcentury (1961) again skillfully presents the conflicts of contemporary society. His nonfiction works include Tour of Duty (1946), Men Who Made the Nation (1957), Mr. Wilson's War (1963), and Easter Island: Island of Enigmas (1971).
See his autobiographical The Best Times (1967); biographies by V. S. Carr (1984); studies by L. W. Wagner (1979) and B. Maine, ed. (1988).
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