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By the 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 frustrations. But they can admire without reservation his narrative style, bare but not bleak, naturalistic but not dull, and his cunning blend of the literary and the colloquial. Dos Passos believes that a writer's modest job is to be an "architect of history." He never talks about creation in connection with his work. His job, he feels, is simply to arrange the materials, confining any artistic high jinks to decoration that will enhance the outlines of the building without weakening its structure.
The Man. 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 he was 14. He went on to become a successful corporation lawyer, an anti-Bryan Democrat, the author of various respectable treatises on such subjects as interstate commerce, the husband of a Southern lady who presented him with Son John Roderigo at the age of 48.
Young John cut his literary milk teeth on Marryat, got from Masterman Ready such an inviting whiff of the sea he once considered going to Annapolis. He remembers being carted around a good deal by his travel-loving parents—to Mexico, Belgium, England, to Washington, and tidewater Virginia. In England he had a year at a 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 & Fall of the Roman Empire was his adolescent Bible.