Word: dos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Dos Passos the man is deceptively unlike Dos Passos the writer. Tall, baldish, bobbing and very nearsighted, he looks like a clever, kind, slightly startled Bill the Lizard in Alice in Wonderland. Born in Chicago, his family, friends and fancy have taken him so many hithers & yons about the Western World that a casual acquaintance might be hard put to name his habitat. His grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant who became a shoemaker in Philadelphia. His father, "a self-made literate," volunteered as a drummer-boy in the Civil War, was invalided out of the Army of the Potomac when...
...private school, afterwards prepared for Harvard at the Choate School. At Harvard, where he was in the same class (1916) with Authors Robert Nathan and Robert Littell, he wrote for the literary magazines but was distinctly not one of "Copey's" (Professor Charles Townsend Copeland's) boys. Dos Passos was constantly on the point of leaving Harvard but never quite got around to it. Though he graduated cum laude, he thinks he got little out of college, regards his four years there as largely wasted. Like his father, he is a self-made literate. Gibbon's Decline...
After Harvard, Dos Passos went to Spain, with the idea of studying architecture. Instead, he enlisted in a French ambulance service, transferred to the A. E. F. as a private in the Medical Corps. He wrote his first book (One Man's Initiation), a story based on his war experience, published in England. As a correspondent and free lance in Spain, after the Armistice, he wrote his second, Three Soldiers, which made him a name in the U. S. with its four-letter realism. With Manhattan Transfer (1925), in which he started experimenting with the form he later perfected...
Unlike most novelists, Dos Passos seldom talks shop, has no liking for professional discussion of his own or his contemporaries' work. He considers writing a full-time job like any other. His own working habits are as steady as a farmer's. He gets up early, works through the morning wherever he happens to be. In Provincetown he swims before lunch, goes sailing every afternoon, takes little or no part in Provincetown's art-colony doings. Since he is traveling most of the time his household has something of the air of a dwelling that is just...
Except for his tenderly polite manner and the enthusiasm that bubbles in his R-less, drawing-room voice, he might be mistaken for a member of Harvard's famed Porcellian Club. He is "Dos" to a wide acquaintance, but he has few intimate friends. At parties he is famed for his polite but sudden departures, for leaving his hat in a special place by itself, so that he will not have to rummage for it when he makes his getaway. Sensitive of other people's feelings to the point of anguish, he will sometimes blurt out what...