“I never could keep the world properly divided into gods and demons for very long,” wrote John Dos Passos, whose predilection toward nuance and tolerance brought him to see himself as a “chronicler”: a writer who might portray political situations and characters but would not deliberately lead the reader to a predetermined conclusion. Privileging the tangible over the ideological, Dos Passos’s writing between the two World Wars reveals the enormous human costs of modern warfare and ensuing political upheavals.
This wide-ranging and engaging collection of essays explores the work of Dos Passos during a time that challenged writers to find new ways to understand and render the unfolding of history. Taking their foci from a variety of disciplines, including fashion, theater, and travel writing, the contributors extend the scholarship on Dos Passos beyond his best-known U.S.A. trilogy. Including scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the volume takes on such topics as how writers should position their labor in relation to that of blue-collar workers and how Dos Passos’s views of Europe changed from fascination to disillusionment. Examinations of the Modernist’s Adventures of a Young Man, Manhattan Transfer, and “The Republic of Honest Men” increase our understanding of the work of a complicated figure in American literature, set against a backdrop of rapidly evolving technology, growing religious skepticism, and political turmoil in the wake of World War I.
