Biography Essay

For readers familiar with his work in the 1920s and 1930s, John Dos Passos's public image seemed clearly defined. His friends and colleagues were expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, experimental dramatists such as John Howard/Lawson, and modernist visual artists such as Fernand Leger. During these decades Dos Passos worked for radical political and artistic causes, serving on the executive board of the New Masses and publicly defending Sacco and Vanzetti in the mid 1920s. Photographs of the author suggested a certain intensity; it was the face of the tough-minded intellectual. Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925), and U.S.A. (1938) were clearly indictments of the capitalist system. It appeared obvious that Dos Passos was one of that species even more numerous among European writers than American, the radical intellectual. When Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time" in 1938, it seemed a perfectly...