Word: dos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last and most perplexing of Dos Passos' innovations is The Camera Eye. Purpose of these autobiographical prose poems is to suggest the shifting point of view of the author as he turns his imagination on the characters who fill his book and the combination of influences that have made him the individual he is and given him the point of view he holds. Like fragmentary warnings scattered through the volumes, they constantly remind the reader of the author's bias, warn him that Dos Passes' picture of reality has been colored by his personal experiences. After...
...Croix de guerre in the War. He has genuine mechanical ability, works as a mechanic for a time, gets along well with plain men when he sees them as individuals. But pursuit of the Big Money corrupts his native talents as well as his good nature, eventually kills him. Dos Passos frames the story of Anderson with thumbnail sketches of Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of scientific management; and Thorstein Veblen. Like Ford, Charley Anderson had native mechanical skill, loved to tinker with machines. Like Taylor, he suffered because he tried to speed up production, to make manufacture efficient...
...Thus Dos Passos intimates that the stories of his characters are not exceptional or unique, that the waste, confusion, purposelessness in their lives, as well as their good human qualities and inborn talents also appear in the lives of famed figures in public history...
Besides these principal pegs on which Author Dos Passos hangs his narrative, scores of other characters appear, reappear and fade away. Eveline Hutchins, the Chicago Jazz-age girl, attains a Manhattan salon only to end her career with an overdose of sleeping powder. G. H. Barrow, labor-faker, gets a paunch and a fur overcoat by "settling" strikes. Ben Compton, a Brooklyn Jew turned radical and one of Mary French's lovers, finds his life ruined when he is read out of the Party for being a "disrupting influence." All of them - in politics, manufacturing, advertising, Wall Street...
...time readers have followed the careers of Dos Passes' characters, studied the sharp, ironic sketches of U. S. public heroes, absorbed the confusion and hysteria of the Newsreels, they are likely to feel that they have received a vivid cross-section report on some U. S. history in a manner neither novelists nor historians supply. They may question whether ordinary private life during that period was as confused and chaotic as Dos Passos represents it, whether he has not overshot his mark in bringing so many of his characters to violent ends, so many of their hopes to tragic...