John Dos Passos

Also known as John Roderigo Dos Passos, J. R. Dos Passos

American novelist (1896–1970)

AI overview

John Dos Passos was an American novelist who lived from 1896 to 1970 and became known for his experimental literary techniques in depicting American life. His innovative narrative methods and large-scale novels made him an influential figure in 20th-century American literature.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1896
Died: 1970
Works: 388

Top works

Selected writings of Blaise Cendrars
William Faulkner, 1897-1962
The living thoughts of Tom Paine
The Crack Up
The big money

via Open Library + Wikidata

Film & TV

Writing

Known for

Spain in Flames — Narrator (voice)1937

via TMDB

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Country: United States
Active from: 1896
Active to: 1970

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 26
Total plays: 223

John Roderigo Dos Passos (/dɵsˈpæsɵs/; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist and artist. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/John+Dos+Passos">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · John Dos Passos

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Generalized Gradient Approximation Made Simple
· 1996 · cited 200,681x
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
· 2021 · cited 41,730x
Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology
· 2000 · cited 36,357x
Matplotlib: A 2D Graphics Environment
· 2007 · cited 34,340x
The MOS 36-ltem Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36)
· 1992 · cited 28,859x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.”
“One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.”
“The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.”
“The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.”
“Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.”
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Wikidata facts

Official website: www.johndospassos.com
Image: John dos Passos.jpg

Show 6 more facts

Commons category: John Dos Passos
date of birth: 1896-01-14
date of death: 1970-09-28
birth name: John Roderigo Dos Passos
name in native language: John Dos Passos
Commons Creator page: John Dos Passos

Sources (3)

via Wikidata · CC0

~20 min read

Article

John Roderigo Dos Passos (/dɒsˈpæsəs, -sɒs/; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his U.S.A. trilogy. He was a descendant of the Lee family of Virginia.

Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visiting Europe and southwest Asia, where he learned about literature, art, and architecture. During World War I, he was an ambulance driver for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in Paris and Italy, before joining the United States Army Medical Corps as a private.