John Dos Passos

(1896 - 1970)

Although born to wealth and privilege, John Dos Passos in the 1920s owed his fame as a novelist to his championing of the cause of the common man. Together with Ernest Hemingway in 1936, he traveled to Spain under the Loyalist flag during the civil war. His intimate acquaintance with the horror that was Stalinist Russia prompted him to abandon his belief in Communism. A leading novelist of the Lost Generation, Dos Passos published Manhattan Transfer in 1925 and the first volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, in 1930.