JOURNAL ARTICLE

-writers and novels-

    What will we read today?

JOHN DOS PASSOS

(1896-1970)

 

John Roderigo Dos Passos was born on January 14, 1896, in Chicago (United States). Dos Passos came from a family of Portuguese origin, the son of a lawyer named John Randalph Dos Passos and Lucy Addison Sprigg, who did not marry until 1910, fourteen years after the birth of John Roderigo.

 

Dos Passos traveled with his parents shortly after his birth to different countries, including Mexico, Belgium and England. He returned to his native country and studied between 1912 and 1916 at Harvard College. After graduating, he went to Spain to study Hispanic-Muslim architecture. This experience helped him to write one of his famous books, ‘Rosinante To The Road Again’ (1922).

 

 

In Europe, he participated in the First World War as an ambulance driver in France and Italy. The war left its mark on his personality and on his work, which began with the novel ‘Initiation of a Man’ (1919). Success came with his second book, ‘Three Soldiers’ (1921), later corroborated with one of his key titles, ‘Manhattan Transfer’ (1925). In 1929 John married Kate Smith, who unfortunately died in 1947 due to a traffic accident. In 1949, he married Elizabeth Holridge, with whom he had a daughter named Lucy.

Look at this video!

  Dos Passos was a member of the so-called Lost Generation, which also includes authors such as Ernest Hemingway or Francis Scott Fitzgerald. His style is framed in the realism of the Chicago School, in which the American dream is ‘demystified’ with an expressionist manifestation and a pessimistic disillusion. In addition to the aforementioned titles, his most significant novels are ‘El Paralelo 42’ (1930), ‘1919’ (1932) and ‘The Big Money’ (1936), a triad of books that make up the so-called ‘USA Trilogy’'.

 

We can also recognize ‘Young Man to Adventure’ (1939), ‘Number One’ (1943) and ‘The Great Project’ (1949). These last titles also make up another trilogy, the so-called ‘District Of Columbia’. He also wrote the autobiography ‘Unforgettable Years’ (1966).

 

 

 

About the famous lost generation

 

This is the name of the group of American writers -Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller- who forged their careers after World War I. In their work they reflected the climate of pessimism of the postwar period and the Depression. Frustrated by the cultural emptiness of their country, most of them traveled at some point to Europe and settled in Paris, where they lived intensely in the 1920s, the era of jazz and its artistic environment. The name Lost Generation was coined by the writer and patron Gertrude Stein, who met several of its members in the French capital.

 

 

           Here you can learn more about it!

He died of heart failure in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 28, 1970, at the age of 74. He is buried in Yeocomico Episcopal Church, Kinsale, Virginia.

 

In 2017, the Peninsula publishing house published ‘Viajes de Entreguerras’, a volume in which Dos Passos reflected his vision of the world between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War. In 2018, the Renacimiento publishing house published ‘Winter in Castile and Other Poems’ in Spanish.

 

 

 

 

Did you like the article?

                                                   

If you liked our article you can consult the following web pages!