American novelist and member of the post-World War I “Lost Generation” John Dos Passos wrote a number of astute social histories critiquing elements of contemporary American life.

Dos Passos was born in 1896 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was a corporate lawyer of Portuguese descent, and the family spent a good deal of time traveling, living for stretches of time in Mexico, Britain, Belgium, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. He attended Harvard University and earned his bachelor’s degree in 1916. During World War I, he went on to volunteer as an ambulance driver in France, much like his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, who served in the same role in Italy. Much of Dos Passos’s early writing includes meditations on his experiences during the First World War. He published his first novel, One Man’s Initiation in 1917 based on his experience as an ambulance driver, followed by Three Soldiers in 1921, which clearly expresses Dos Passos’s anti-war sentiments.

After the end of World War I, Dos Passos became a newspaper correspondent, a role which allowed him to travel extensively around Spain. His time in Europe solidified his radical political perspective and allowed him to develop relationships with other influential literary figures, including E.E. Cummings, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was able to establish a distinct literary style as well as a favorable reputation among these icons through the publication of Manhattan Transfer (1925), an experimental portrait of New York City critiquing the consumerism and social indifference permeating society. In the 1920s and 30s, Dos Passos was highly regarded by his contemporaries; Jean-Paul Sartre referred to him as “the best novelist of our time.”

Dos Passos is best known for his set of three novels: The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), which together form his U.S.A. trilogy. The trilogy offers a disenchanted portrait of an increasingly industrialized American society from 1898 to 1929, and the resultant capitalist social values. The U.S.A. trilogy features real newspaper headlines from the time, as well as elements of biographies of influential contemporary American figures, including Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Ford, and J.P. Morgan. It also reflects on the dual-image of the United States, as the home to both the rich and privileged and the poor and powerless. The trilogy ends with its heroine deciding to join the Communist party, as a reaction to what she perceives as injustices of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

Dos Passos worked in close collaboration with his first wife, Katherine Smith, who was also a writer. However, in 1947 Smith and Dos Passos were in a terrible automobile accident. Smith died from her injuries and Dos Passos lost his left eye. He remarried two years later, and he and his second wife, Elizabeth Hamlin Holdridge, moved to his father’s old farm in Virginia, where the couple would stay between travels.

Despite Dos Passos’ early critical and popular success, critics did not respond nearly as well to his later works of the 1940s and 1950s. Many stated that his writing displayed a narrow view of life, and that his political and social perspectives were “rant-like: in nature. As Dos Passos aged, he grew disillusioned with the leftist politics to which he had ardently subscribed, and his attitude shifted towards political conservatism.

Though Dos Passos had once been regarded in the same class as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, during the 1950s and 1960s, his work declined in popularity. Regardless, her received membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Gold Medal for Fiction of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957.

Dos Passos died in 1970 at age 74 due to a heart ailment. At the time of his death, his work received minimal critical attention, however over his lifetime, he published over 40 novels, and left behind a reputation as one of the defining writers of the Lost Generation.