John Dos Passos Essays - John Dos Passos, Old Right,

John Dos Passos Almost every one writer can say that they are influenced by their childhood and past. Memories flood back to them as they encounter a similar experience or similar situation in their earlier years. No doubt a significant factor in their writing, the past from a specific writer's life usually adds more depth and complexity to their works. Because these previous experiences are from the author's actual life, the scenes and subjects related to the theme are more accurate and realistic, and may even be more appealing to read. These past voices may appear either consciously through the author's works, or sometimes unconsciously, guided maybe by some early childhood memory. Well, whatever the case, John Dos Passos was such a man that appeared to have been significantly influenced by his past. Born un-rooted to any plot of land, his life was a mission to search for new ground on which to grow, which can be seen as an major theme throughout all his works. Dos Passos grew up to a turbulent childhood, being unconventionally born on January 14, 1896. His father, John Randalph Dos Passos, was a prominent attorney and his mother, Lucy Addison Sprigg, a housewife and an excellent mother. Because his parents were not officially married until in 1910, he was considered "illegitimate" for about 14 years; this theme of alienation is found in many of his writings. Most of the time spent during his childhood was with his mother, who travelled abundantly, and this was the time where he grew closer to his mother and started to drift away from the man he called "dad". His travels with his mom led him to places such as Mexico, Belgium, and England. Dos Passos's association with France began when he was very young, and his knowledge of the language was quite thorough. Much of his French expertise is showed off in his works, including Manhattan Transfer. Dos Passos first attended school in the District of Colombia. As he grew up, he spent some of his childhood in Tidewater Virginia. He began attending Choate School where his first published writings were articles for the Choate School News. Upon completing Choate School at the age of fifteen, he entered Harvard University in 1912. At Harvard, he continued his journalism by joining the Harvard Monthly. While at Harvard, he developed a close, long-lasting friendship with E.E. Cummings. During this time at Harvard, the spirit of idealism swept the country. Dos Passos was stirred by ideas of idealism and began to write short autobiographical tales for the Harvard Monthly, which showed vague idealism. He later graduated in June of 1916. Out of college now, Dos Passos choose to volunteer for ambulance duty overseas but his father rejected his idea. So instead, he decided to make his first long visit to Spain, a country which held fascination for him all his life, to study architecture. With the death of his father lather in 1917, he joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Group and sailed for France. During his tour of duty as an ambulance driver, he collaborated with a friend, Robert Hillyer, on alternate chapters of a novel, and after several revisions, it became One Man's Initiation - 1917. This book was based largely on his own wartime experiences in France and Italy. His second novel, Three Soldiers, was published in 1920. In 1915, Harper published Manhattan Transfer, a city novel in which Dos Passos first began to use the experimental techniques he would develop more fully in his major contributions to American fiction. The themes of this novel are typical of Dos Passos's work: alienation, loneliness, frustration, and loss of individuality but Manhattan Transfer " was his first success at creating a 'collective novel' where a unifying theme is conveyed through multiple facets of character and situation." (Wrenn,32) He borrowed styles from Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot and found many technical and artistic ideas in early twentieth century French literature. Taking segments of his life, Dos Passos intermingled it with his imagination to make Manhattan Transfer what it is. The autobiography is placed almost entirely within the life of a single fictional character, Jimmy Herf, a young newspaper reporter with ambitions to become a writer. The role of Herf was not simple to bring the author's experience into the novel, but probably instead to show him as being like a rebel, overcoming obstacles that success command, and finding values that counter what society feels important. But also representing Dos Passos, was Armand Duval, "Congo Jake", an anarchist and bootlegger who learns how to ridicule the law and get away with it. He illustrates