SOURCE: "Revisiting Dos Passos' U.S.A.;' in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XX, No. 3, Autumn, 1979, pp. 401-15.

In the following essay, Levin discusses the political beliefs of John Dos Passos, particularly in U.S.A.

John Dos Passos' reputation reached its highest point in 1938, when Jean-Paul Sartre—reviewing the French translation of Nineteen Nineteen—proclaimed him without reservation "the greatest writer of our time." Sartre's critical attitudes have always been dictated by the personal or dialectical use he could make of his subjects, and he went on to imitate Dos Passos' method in his own unfinished tetralogy, Les Chemins de la liberté. He might not have considered that method so uniquely experimental if he had had any firsthand acquaintance with Ulysses (and Joyce was then still alive). But much of Nineteen Nineteen had the advantage, from Sartre's point of view, of being set in France. Insofar as he...