SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES IN THE NOVELS OF DOS PASSOS

Abstract

Dos Passos wrote more than forty books during his lifetime, including poetry, plays, travel books, political tracts, histories, and biographies. He is better known, though, for his novels, and best of all for the documentary style fiction he wrote during the twenties and thirties. He is the best known for, and to those others which are representative of a period in his career or of a change in political or stylistic direction. Though it is certainly true that no American writer has been more subjected to political judgment than Dos Passos, has the history of the critical response shows that what made him the most promising American writer of the thirties and a much less respected writer. Later on, he had as much to do with his art as with his politics, if indeed the two can be separated. A critical reception never stops developing, and neither does historical consciousness ever fully reveal itself in openly stated principles or propositions.