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Unworried at the size of his audience, John Dos Passos thinks that "the power of writing is more likely to be exercised vertically through a century than horizontally over a year's sales." With those who claim they write for money or for self-expression he has no patience. The affectations of literary people annoy him no end. To those who have exaggerated ideas about their art or their position as artists, he is apt to crack back: "A man writes to be damned, not to be saved." Alone among U. S. writers, Private Historian John Dos Passos has taken as his subject the whole U. S. and attempted to organize its chaotic, high-pressure life into an understandable artistic pattern. To find the equivalent of his nationalism one must look abroad, to Tolstoy's War and Peace, to Balzac's Comedie Humaine, to James Joyce's Ulysses.
*Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).