John Dos Passos

Born in Chicago, the illegitimate son of a wealthy corporate lawyer, Dos Passos was educated at Choate and Harvard before volunteering as a wartime ambulance driver alongside Hemingway and E. E. Cummings, an experience that convinced him modern war was industrial slaughter dressed up in patriotic language.

Manhattan Transfer collaged dozens of overlapping New York lives (financiers, chorus girls, immigrants, drifters) into a single kaleidoscopic portrait, its cut-up, cinematic technique borrowed directly from Joyce's Ulysses. He pushed the method further across the U.S.A. trilogy, interrupting fictional narratives with 'Newsreel' collages of real headlines and 'Camera Eye' stream-of-consciousness interludes to build an entire nation's panorama.

An ardent leftist in the 1920s, Dos Passos was radicalized rightward after the Spanish Civil War, when his close friend José Robles was executed by Soviet-backed forces; the reversal cost him standing with critics who never forgave the politics, even as his formal innovations kept shaping the American novel.