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Grade Level:       Type of Work           Subject/Topic is on:
 [ ]6-8                 [ ]Class Notes    [Essay on Dos Passos     ]
 [ ]9-10                [ ]Cliff Notes    [                        ]
 [x]11-12               [x]Essay/Report   [                        ]
 [ ]College             [ ]Misc           [                        ]

 Dizzed: 09/94  # of Words:2008  School: ?              State: ?
ФФФФФФФФФ>ФФФФФФФФФ>ФФФФФФФФФ>Chop Here>ФФФФФФФФФ>ФФФФФФФФФ>ФФФФФФФФФ>ФФФФФФФФФ
     Almost every one writer can say that they are influenced by
their childhood and past. Memories flood back to them as they
encounter a similar experience or similar situation in their
earlier years. No doubt a significant factor in their writing,
the past from a specific writer's life usually adds more depth
and complexity to their works. Because these previous experiences
are from the author's actual life, the scenes and subjects
related to the theme are more accurate and realistic, and may
even be more appealing to read. These past voices may appear
either consciously through the author's works, or sometimes
unconsciously, guided maybe by some early childhood memory. Well,
whatever the case, John Dos Passos was such a man that appeared
to have been significantly influenced by his past. Born un-rooted
to any plot of land, his life was a mission to search for new
ground on which to grow, which can be seen as an major theme
throughout all his works.
     Dos Passos grew up to a turbulent childhood, being
unconventionally born on January 14, 1896. His father, John
Randalph Dos Passos, was a prominent attorney and his mother,
Lucy Addison Sprigg, a housewife and an excellent mother. Because
his parents were not officially married until in 1910, he was
considered "illegitimate" for about 14 years; this theme of
alienation is found in many of his writings. Most of the time
spent during his childhood was with his mother, who travelled
abundantly, and this was the time where he grew closer to his
mother and started to drift away from the man he called "dad".
His travels with his mom led him to places such as Mexico,
Belgium, and England. Dos Passos's association with France began
when he was very young, and his knowledge of the language was
quite thorough. Much of his French expertise is showed off in his
works, including Manhattan Transfer.
     Dos Passos first attended school in the District of
Colombia. As he grew up, he spent some of his childhood in
Tidewater Virginia. He began attending Choate School where his
first published writings were articles for the Choate School
News. Upon completing Choate School at the age of fifteen, he
entered Harvard University in 1912. At Harvard, he continued his
journalism by joining the Harvard Monthly. While at Harvard, he
developed a close, long-lasting friendship with E.E. Cummings.
During this time at Harvard, the spirit of idealism swept the
country. Dos Passos was stirred by ideas of idealism and began to
write short autobiographical tales for the Harvard Monthly, which
showed vague idealism. He later graduated in June of 1916.
     Out of college now, Dos Passos choose to volunteer for
ambulance duty overseas but his father rejected his idea. So
instead, he decided to make his first long visit to Spain, a
country which held fascination for him all his life, to study
architecture. With the death of his father lather in 1917, he
joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Group and sailed for France.
During his tour of duty as an ambulance driver, he collaborated
with a friend, Robert Hillyer, on alternate chapters of a novel,
and after several revisions, it became One Man's Initiation -
1917. This book was based largely on his own wartime experiences
in France and Italy. His second novel, Three Soldiers, was
published in 1920.
     In 1915, Harper published Manhattan Transfer, a city novel
in which Dos Passos first began to use the experimental
techniques he would develop more fully in his major contributions
to American fiction. The themes of this novel are typical of Dos
Passos's work: alienation, loneliness, frustration, and loss of
individuality but Manhattan Transfer " was his first success at
creating a 'collective novel' where a unifying theme is conveyed
through multiple facets of character and situation." (Wrenn,32)
He borrowed styles from Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, James Joyce, and
T.S. Eliot and found many technical and artistic ideas in early
twentieth century French literature.
     Taking segments of his life, Dos Passos intermingled it with
his imagination to make Manhattan Transfer what it is. The
autobiography is placed almost entirely within the life of a
single fictional character, Jimmy Herf, a young newspaper
reporter with ambitions to become a writer. The role of Herf was
not simple to bring the author's experience into the novel, but
probably instead to show him as being like a rebel, overcoming
obstacles that success command, and finding values that counter
what society feels important. But also representing Dos Passos,
was Armand Duval, "Congo Jake", an anarchist and bootlegger who
learns how to ridicule the law and get away with it. He
illustrates Dos Passos's side that desired independence
from his parents, producing a theme of individual liberty.
     The theme of Dos Passos not being born to any plot of land,
with his life a mission to find new ground on which to grow is
representative by Jimmy Herf's life. Jimmy arrives in Manhattan
hopeful of a new life; to settle down with a beautiful wife and
acquire a satisfying job. He eventually does win the heart of
Ellen Thatcher and becomes a successful writer, but in the end he
allows Ellen to divorce him, and on the last few lines of the
book he says,
          At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and
          winks, is a gasoline station, opposite of the Lighting
          Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter
          for breakfast. that leaves him three cents for good
          luck, or bad luck for that matter. A huge furniture
          truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.
               " 'Say will you give me a lift?' he asks the
          redhaired man at the wheel.
               " 'How fur ye going?'
               " 'I dunno... Pretty far.' "
These last words of the novel suggest a optimistic point of view
upon Herf, as he walks out of Manhattan as a homeless vagrant,
without family, without money, on toward a new life.
     Dos Passos may have viewed New York as a place of entry upon
U.S.A. Like a transit point where people enter and leave from.
Thus, the first settings with Jimmy Herf and Congo are set aboard
ocean liners entering the port of New York. We find Congo talking
to one of his friends,
          I want to get somewhere in the world, that's what I
          mean. Europe's rotten and stinking. In America a fellow
          can get ahead. Birth don't matter, education don't
          matter. It's all getting ahead
The book directs the readers attention to the fact that Manhattan
is only a temporary place: " the emphasis on fire and
destruction, the theme of 'The Burthen of Nineveh', and the
recurring motif of the song,
          Oh it rained forty days
          And it rained forty nights
          And it didn't stop till Christmas
          And the only man that survived the flood
          Was longlegged Jack of the Isthmus"     (Wrenn,122)
Besides being the title of one of the chapters in book, the
Isthmus may have been Manhattan Island, which was like a strip of
land connecting Europe to mainland U.S.A.
     Although Jimmy Herf was the main character of the novel,
when he ends up marrying Ellen Thatcher, a beautiful and talented
young Broadway actress, the book shifts toward her direction and
we are drawn into her life. "She grows up, becomes an actress,
marries and divorces a homosexual actor, marries the
observer-protagonist Jimmy Herf, becomes a successful editor,
enters the world of the powerful, divorces Jimmy, and drifts
toward another marriage." (DBLv9,44) She may have represent what
Dos Passos believed the characteristics of his life, which were
ruthless and unforgiving, could have been.
     Although the novel centers it's attention mainly around
Jimmy and Ellen, Dos Passos produced it so that we also bare
witness to the other fifty or sixty more characters in the novel
to obtain the sense of " being intimate witnesses to a series of
interwoven human dramas." (DLBv9,44) We witness the story of Stan
Emory, the high-spirited but drunk architect who commits suicide;
of Joe Harland, failed financier turned alcoholic; of Bud
Korpening, a young boy looking for a job in the city but is
driven to his death by the fear of it; of Anna Cohen, who dies
sewing dresses for the wealthy.
     When Dos Passos's mother died in the April of 1916, it
threatened to destroy whatever balance there was between his head
and his heart. His father, being a stranger to him, was not there
when he needed him, and instead, the only person he could trust
in time of despair was his mother. He had known her intimately,
and she had become a part of him. But this death was not the only
that occurred for only a few months later, Dos Passos's father
died too." It was the end of parental authority, of his feelings
of moral responsibility to the ideals of class which his father
presented, and his boyhood." (Wrenn,39) Dos Passos wrote
prolifically and sought the literacy career to prove to his
father that he was the man his father was, and worthy of his
father's name. These deaths influenced him to write an upcoming
novel called Rosinante to the Road Again, which portrays two
characters, Telemachus and Lyaeus, who are made in the image of
Dos Passos.
     Besides his parents deaths, he was " subject to a number of
influences which might have developed in him the penchant for
puzzling about the meaning of what people said an did."
(Wrenn,35) From his grandfather, he may have acquired a certain
Latin sensitiveness tending toward emotionalism. From his father,
a keen mind alert for significant details, and from both a
restlessness of spirit that would keep him ever searching for the
better society, the better way of life. His stormy childhood may
have induced his habit of first grasping details before he could
comprehend the whole. And because he was born in hotel, his mind
and attitude developed the influence of home, a place he never
really knew. " The rootless existence of his childhood left him
longing for something to belong to, something to believe in."
(Wrenn,35)
     Some of the unique styles and techniques of writing used
today were established by Dos Passos. He employed several
features into his works, such as one called the "Newsreel", which
used newspaper headlines, words from popular songs, and
advertisements to surround the action and characters. Another
technique was called "The Camera's Eye", which gave the author's
view of his subject and sections of actual events, such as the
Succo Vanzetti trial. " Dos Passos regarded his style as
providing a social and historical background in which individual
actions reflected larger patterns he saw in his society."
(WBv5,313) Using these innovative techniques, Dos Passos was able
to present a compare and contrast perspective that presents the
reader with a multidimensional view of the first thirty years
of American life in the twentieth century. More than any of his
contemporaries, Dos Passos embraced the novel as a means to
persuade - and to persuade in a political direction.
     When Dos Passos died in 1970, the world not only lost a
great writer, but one ranked among the most important American
writers of the century. " Dos Passos believed that his novels
served as a catalyst that forced people to study their lives; man
has the ability to recast his present in terms of the past while
allowing the future to exert it's influence." (Patrick,346)
Searching for a place to belong, Dos Passos made himself a
environment in which he was accepted. As Jean-Paul Sartre
declared in 1938,
          He is not, perhaps, " the greatest writer of our time "
          but as a political novelist and chronicler of American
          civilization   from 1900 to the Great Depression, Dos
          Passos has an established place in American literary
          history   (CLCv32,125)
For years he did not enjoy the critical esteem that his
contemporaries, Hemingway and Faulkner, had but today critics
have begun to understand the importance of his writing, and
finding them major works of fiction and time capsules of a
critical period of U.S. history.
