Dos Passos Resources

I should be reading John Dos Passos instead of reading about him. I am trying to get this blog up to speed and I cannot deny my curiosity which gets me into filling in the blanks of my education.I can report what I have read of Dos Passos impresses me greatly - he is a more supple writer than I thought likely from my reading about Dos Passos. 

Here is what I found:

• Century's Ebb: A blog on the life and work of John Dos Passos (1896-1970) -although nothing appeared after 2012.
• John Dos Passos Association - another collection of information

I think of this as a sign that Dos Passos is bit quite forgotten:

“all right we are two nations”

So wrote John Dos Passos in his 1936 novel The Big Money. For Dos Passos, America between the world wars had become a place defined by sharp divisions, pitting the oppressors against the oppressed.

Inhabiting one nation were the rich and powerful, those in a position, as Dos Passos put it, to “hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons.” In the other nation were ordinary people — immigrants, workers, the downtrodden — struggling to get by, but “beaten by strangers … who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul.”

The elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency reveals that we are once again (or perhaps still) two nations. But the divide between the haves and the have-nots is no longer adequate to describe the cleavages laid bare by the election of 2016. For Dos Passos, influenced by the Marxism that was then fashionable, class differences were of paramount importance. Today while still relevant, class alone provides an inadequate explanatory framework. Our cleavages are more profound and encompass status and culture, and by extension race, gender and ethnicity.

‘All Right We Are Two Nations’: Unless we find a way to close the divide in our nation, we may end up not having a nation at all.  Andrew Bacevich.  NOVEMBER 9, 2016

 Moving past The USA Trilogy, here his grandson reviews his grandfather's memoir The Best Times.