John Dos Passos

Date of Birth: January 14, 1896

Zodiac Sign: Capricorn

Date of Death: September 28, 1970

Biography

John Roderigo Dos Passos was born on January 14, 1896, in Chicago, Illinois, to a wealthy family. He is best known as a novelist and a significant figure in 20th-century American literature. Dos Passos graduated from Harvard University in 1916, and his experiences traveling and serving as an ambulance driver during World War I profoundly influenced his writing. He became a part of the Lost Generation, a group of American writers who gained prominence in the 1920s. Dos Passos is most famous for his U.S.A. trilogy, comprising “The 42nd Parallel” (1930), “1919” (1932), and “The Big Money” (1936). These novels presented an innovative combination of narrative styles, including stream of consciousness, biographical sketches, and newspaper clippings, to provide a panoramic view of American society. Throughout his career, Dos Passos’s work was marked by a deep engagement with social and political issues, and he often critiqued capitalism and the American Dream. In addition to his novels, Dos Passos was an accomplished playwright, painter, and journalist. His views shifted over time, and by the 1940s, he had moved away from his earlier radicalism to a more conservative stance. Dos Passos continued to write until his death on September 28, 1970, in Baltimore, Maryland.

5 Interesting Facts about John Dos Passos

1. Dos Passos’s father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother was of Portuguese descent.

2. He was a contemporary and friend of other notable writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

3. Dos Passos was a part of the Red Cross Ambulance Service during World War I, which inspired his early works.

4. He traveled extensively throughout his life, including a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1920s that influenced his political views.

5. In addition to his literary achievements, Dos Passos was a skilled painter and even held several exhibitions of his artwork.

5 Most Interesting Quotes from John Dos Passos

1. “A satirist is a man whose soul is never satisfied with the world as it is and whose imagination has the audacity to compare it with the world as it might be.”

2. “The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.”

3. “Break the continuity and you break the spell.”

4. “People don’t choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.”

5. “A man’s got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.”

Highest Net Worth Achieved

At the peak of his career, John Dos Passos’s net worth was estimated to be around $1 million, a significant sum considering the era in which he lived.

Children

John Dos Passos had one daughter, Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos, born to his second wife, Elizabeth Hamlin Holdridge. Lucy Dos Passos has worked to preserve her father’s literary legacy.