– John Dos Passos – Lecture at The University Of Illinois – July 1955 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
American Writer John Dos Passos, in a lecture given at the University Of Illinois in 1955. He is probably best known for his U.S.A. Trilogy, written in 1938.
Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visiting Europe and southwest Asia, where he learned about literature, art, and architecture. During World War I, he was an ambulance driver for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in Paris and Italy, before joining the United States Army Medical Corps as a private.
In 1920, his first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, was published, and in 1925, his novel Manhattan Transfer became a commercial success. His U.S.A. trilogy, which consists of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), was ranked by the Modern Library in 1998 as 23rd of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Written in experimental, non-linear form, the trilogy blends elements of biography and news reports to paint a landscape of early 20th-century American culture.
Dos Passos’s major work is the U.S.A. trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos used experimental techniques in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings, autobiography, biography, and fictional realism to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the 20th century. Though each novel stands on its own, the trilogy is designed to be read as a whole. Dos Passos’s political and social reflections in the novel are deeply pessimistic about the political and economic direction of the United States, and few of the characters manage to hold onto their ideals through the First World War. The novel reflects the writer’s sympathy, at the time of writing, for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and his outrage at its suppression, for which the book expresses a deep grudge for President Woodrow Wilson.
Dos Passos’s pioneering works of nonlinear fiction were a major influence in the field. In particular Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads To Freedom trilogy show the influence of his methods. In a 1936 essay, “On John Dos Passos and 1919”, Sartre referred to Dos Passos as “the greatest writer of our time.”
American writer Mary McCarthy said that The 42nd Parallel was among the chief influences on her own work. In the television documentary, The Odyssey of John Dos Passos (1994), writer Norman Mailer said: “Those three volumes of U.S.A. make up the idea of a ‘Great American Novel.”‘
Here is that lecture delivered by John Dos Passos, along with a Question and Answer period from July 1955.
Biographical information courtesy of Wikipedia.
