Word: dos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...John Dos Passos, a literary Lazarus at 70, is being revived from the dead during his own lifetime...
Esteemed in the '20s, famous in the '30s, Dos Passos in the '40s almost underwent extinction of reputation such as befell Britain's John Galsworthy or America's Joseph Hergesheimer - two popular near-contemporaries who, as far as today's public is concerned, might just as well have written in Sumerian cuneiform...
...Quiet One. Several elements serve to explain Dos Passes' eclipse. A change in literary fashion left him beached with the wreckage of the realistic novel. A change in intellectual-political fashion, moreover, left his best work tainted by identification with the social-protest or even "proletarian" production of the Red Decade. This offense was compounded by the fact that his later work gave aid and comfort to the right, just as his earlier books had succored the left. The three novels that constitute District of Columbia (1952) have been unfairly dismissed as the rightist tracts of an embittered...
...third factor has fixed his position as low man on the totem pole of literary fashion. In an age of publicity, puff and promotion, John Dos Passos never developed an exploitable personality. He never became a Great White Hunter, or a symbol of doomed gilded youth, or a pornographer, or a public crackpot or private monster, or even a member of the pansy international, any of which roles might have given him an identifiable and saleable personality. He never even wrote the kind of novels in which some character would turn up again and aeain and enable the reader...
Thirty years ago, when Dos Passos wrote The Big Money, the second novel of the U.S.A. trilogy, a TIME cover story (Aug. 10, 1936) saw him mainly as a valuable contemporary historian, a journalist of genius rather than a novelist-the composer, as Dos Passos puts it now, of "a narrative panorama to which I saw no end." These judgments pertain today, though it is also true that the work that stood "midway between history and fiction" was fiction all along. Dos Passes' bare, flat non-style, in which events-tragical, comical, pastoral or historical-were impersonally told...