Word: dos
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...John Dos Passes started traveling in his bassinette. Born in Chicago (1896), he was taken to Mexico City by his parents the same year. Since then, he has covered every continent except Australia, on every conveyance from a Volga River steamer to a dromedary-and very often on Shank's mare. Meanwhile he has published 18 books. (Best known: U.S.A., a three-panel novel of U.S. life and character circa World...
Last year Dos Passos took his most important journey. His send-off was a soldier's bitter letter. To answer its charges-that workers in industry were making too much money, that civilians should be regimented since soldiers were, that people charged with hampering the war effort should be shot without trial-he went to see for himself what was happening throughout the U.S. The widening rift between civilians and servicemen troubled him. He believed that although "all sorts of injustices have flourished under [the U.S. system] . . . I don't think you'll deny that during...
State of the Nation is a report of a miracle, and Dos Passos' best book. Its 333 pages and 14 chapters cover the U.S. from Portland, Me. to Portland, Ore. It is the distillation of innumerable interviews in shipyards, union offices, hotel rooms, bars, restaurants, sharecroppers' cabins, trailer camps, busses, trains, automobiles, machine shops...
Like a Tornado. The wartime U.S.A. that Dos Passes saw on his trip was unaware of its own achievements. In Port land, Me., the business district looked as if a tornado had struck it. "Everywhere litter and trash, small gimcrack stores, small unswept lunchrooms. . . . There were signs and cigaret ads instead of goods in the shop windows. The shipyard workers lived in half-slums, in trailer camps, in rows of prefabricated dwellings. When the shifts changed, the dense black crowd poured out through the gates, their faces gray and yellowish, their visored caps pulled over their foreheads, their thick clothes...
...Dos Passos was conscious of the strain and fatigue of the workmen, the ordeal of learning new skills, rediscovering forgot ten ones. He was more conscious than most of the contrasts of the new America, the litter and dirt, social as well as physical, and the beauty of the old towns, the electrifying wonder of the new industrial creations. Once he stood under the columned porch of a New England building watching the noontime traffic. Across the street a church steeple rose in the murky winter light. There was the smell of burning leaves in the air, the chatter...