As a lover of film music, I often think of what sort of orchestral score should accompany a potential film or TV adaptation of John Dos Passos stories. I’m a big fan of legendary Hollywood film composer Jerry Goldsmith and I think one of this themes from the film City Hall (1996), “The Bridge,” is… Read more »
I’ve ordered a used copy of John Dos Passos’ Tour of Duty. I’ve never read it before and I think now is a great time for it. Americans of my generation–the millennials–tend to take for granted that Europe is stable, democratic, and aligned perfectly with the United States. I don’t remember the Soviet Union at… Read more »
My grandfather wrote in summer 1916 of Dos Passos Farm: “A wonderful blowy day and the hollyhocks are nodding and bowing like tall ladies at a country dance–the poppies are all a-flutter and the lavender comes in puffs of glorious fragrance through the window.” The summer magic is still here.
Reading a bit of Virginia Spencer Carr’s bio of John Dos Passos for a writing gig. She writes that in 1916, Harvard did not yet have a single course in American literature. Nor did any university except Princeton. That’s a remarkable thing. That truly explains the mind of a Lost Generation writer. Hemingway, Dos Passos,… Read more »
Dos Who? When one thinks of the American modernist pantheon—and who doesn’t at least three times daily?—I suspect the usual names rise to the fore: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. For reasons not always so clear, the name that is often either left off this list,… Read more »
Intriguing new article in The Guardian about the “sound art” of Manhattan Transfer and parallels between Dos Passos and composer Edgar Varèse. “The writer John Dos Passos and composer Edgard Varèse would intuit a different, deeper truth about the city they lived and worked in during the 1920s – that its identity is inseparable from… Read more »
Coming of age in the Washington DC area, learning how to write and finding my way as a writer, I’ve long loved The Washington Post. It represents Woodward and Bernstein. It represents truth. The First Amendment. The end of the Nixon era. I’m delighted to see Gary Krist’s review of James McGrath Morris’ Hemingway-Dos Passos… Read more »
I’ve been doing so much JDP legacy work lately I was inspired to write a poem about it: Dos Passos-savvy When I was a boy I knew books; they showed sharks, rays, barracudas, saw-jawed megalodons, Tyrannosaurus rex, Fujita scale tornadic intensity, cirrus, cumulocirrus, cumulonimbus clouds, Hercules holding up the world, no tears, no help…. Read more »
I found this quote quite recently in the Dos Passos oeuvre. Given the salience of environmental matters today and always, I’m delighted to share it. It’s certainly appropriate for Earth Day. It’s from a little-known Dos Passos nonfiction work called The Ground We Stand On. We have taken the accomplishments in state building of the… Read more »
Congratulations to author James McGrath Morris for this fine review of his new Dos Passos-Hemingway book in The Economist. A career achievement indeed!
Introducing the brand new John Dos Passos Society website! Join today! The next conference is in 2018 in Lisbon.
The Loyalty of John Dos Passos (For the upcoming John Dos Passos Society Newsletter) The 2016 2nd biennial John Dos Passos Society conference in Madrid brought me to joyful tears. My first trip to Madrid in 2014 gave me the chance to participate in Sonia Tercero Ramiro’s wonderful documentary on the Robles-Dos Passos story,… Read more »
Biographer James McGrath Morris, author of the new book The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War, pens a wonderful guest piece in The Daily Beast. It’s a concise contrast of the two authors’ visions for art and authorship. A selection: To Hemingway and Dos Passos, the war had… Read more »
Another review to share for James McGrath Morris’ The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War. This time in The Santa Fe New Mexican. A selection from the review: “Unlike Dos Passos, Hemingway had no interest in pondering [war’s] causes, worrying about its conduct, or even being bothered by… Read more »
Enjoy the trailer for James McGrath Morris’ new book exploring the Hemingway-Dos Passos friendship. Morris delivers the narration in a fabulous radio voice and the pictures bring the era alive! The book releases Tuesday! You can pre-order now via Amazon.
With the book release just a week away, press coverage is revving up for The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War by talented biographer James McGrath Morris. The New York Post has a piece on it today. “The world was shattered, and Hemingway and Dos Passos explicitly felt… Read more »
I think I’ve seen John Dos Passos mentioned as an influence on author Kim Stanley Robinson before. Here is a reference in a Sacramento magazine. I’ll have to discover Robinson’s work!
Congratulations to Danzy Senna, novelist and short story author, winner of the 2017 Longwood University Dos Passos Prize! I’m excited to discover her work.
The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos: A Collection and Study is a new book on his visual art. I love so many of those works. To me, they’re reflections of the glow inside him. That wonder for the world that kept him going despite two world wars. The editors are Donald Pizer, Lisa Nanney,… Read more »
John Dos Passos, along with Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Auslander, Ring Lardner Jr, and Dashiell Hammett, contributed to the debut issue of Esquire magazine in 1933. In those days, novelists could really make a buck with magazine work. There was a path to solvency and even profit. Much harder today to get regular magazine gigs.
