Word: dos
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...student who questions encouraged, the questioning scientist praised, but the questioning churchman condemned? Today Bishop Pike finds himself in the same predicament as did Socrates and Christ-born before his time. After all, faith is just that; it's not a list of dos...
Influential Style. That hidden art was often overshadowed by Dos Passes' obtrusive style. He devised what he called The Camera Eye-poetically subjective inlays in the raw plain-deal prose, where the novelist had his metrical fling out of earshot of his characters. Another invention was the impressionist profile of contemporary figures, of which the most famous had the echoing refrain: "Wars, machine-gun fire and arson-good growing weather for the House of Morgan." These sketches-of Henry Ford and Big Bill Haywood the Wobbly leader, of Rudolph Valentino and Isadora Duncan-were brilliant in themselves...
...Dos Passos also interpolated his narrative with the Newsreel, an impressionistic montage of headlines and boldfaced journalism that sharpened the ironic barb of his deadpan stories. The three inventions-with the waning of Dos Passos' reputation-have been dismissed as fashionable quirks of the experimental '30s, like that of e e cummings' renunciation of the capital letter or Dos Passes' own abhorrence of the hyphen. It can now be seen that they were more than razzmatazz...
...Preserved. It would be oversimplifying to see Dos Passos as one who has taken two paces to the left and three to the right. There is a core of consistency in his work that reconciles the "left" tone of U.S.A. with the "rightist" color of District of Columbia. Big Business was the enemy in U.S.A. In District, the focus of power shifted: the first novel in that trilogy dealt with the power of Communism to corrupt innocent idealism; the second was a primer on political demagoguery; the third a parable directed against the emotional debaucheries of the New Deal...
...enormous noise of silence has followed the ideological clamor of the '30s. But Dos Passos can now be regarded as an essential historian of an era-not a great novelist but a greater taker of notes playing the unwelcome role of a man who repeats things that others have said and would rather forget. It may seem old hat today, but it is a hat that many Americans have worn. Dos Passos may well claim to have been consistent in the oldfashioned, cranky Yankee way of distrusting all ideologies, of resisting all managerial systems that claim to improve...