Word: dos
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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...
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...
...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...