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After Harvard, Dos Passos went to Spain, with the idea of studying architecture. Instead, he enlisted in a French ambulance service, transferred to the A. E. F. as a private in the Medical Corps. He wrote his first book (One Man's Initiation), a story based on his war experience, published in England. As a correspondent and free lance in Spain, after the Armistice, he wrote his second, Three Soldiers, which made him a name in the U. S. with its four-letter realism. With Manhattan Transfer (1925), in which he started experimenting with the form he later perfected in The 42nd Parallel, his literary reputation was solidly established. Besides his novels, he has written two books of travel, a volume of essays, a volume of verse, three plays, translated Poet Blaise Cendrars from the French and adapted a novel by Pierre Louys for the cinema (The Devil Is a Woman).
He sketches and paints in near-professional manner but has not lost his amateur standing as an artist. He writes wherever he happens to be, finds crowded Provincetown on Cape Cod as good a place to work as any. There in his harborside cottage he lives between travels, with his handsome wife. (She writes for women's magazines under the name of Katherine Smith.)
Unlike most novelists, Dos Passos seldom talks shop, has no liking for professional discussion of his own or his contemporaries' work. He considers writing a full-time job like any other. His own working habits are as steady as a farmer's. He gets up early, works through the morning wherever he happens to be. In Provincetown he swims before lunch, goes sailing every afternoon, takes little or no part in Provincetown's art-colony doings. Since he is traveling most of the time his household has something of the air of a dwelling that is just being moved into, with trunks and crates crowding the back rooms, books that he uses for research scattered around the walls.
Except for his tenderly polite manner and the enthusiasm that bubbles in his R-less, drawing-room voice, he might be mistaken for a member of Harvard's famed Porcellian Club. He is "Dos" to a wide acquaintance, but he has few intimate friends. At parties he is famed for his polite but sudden departures, for leaving his hat in a special place by itself, so that he will not have to rummage for it when he makes his getaway. Sensitive of other people's feelings to the point of anguish, he will sometimes blurt out what he fears is an unpalatable truth, then hastily cover up his remark with polite qualifications. Conversationally compact of nods and becks and wreathed smiles, he is a very different sort of fellow at his writing table.