On his 130th birthday, the theme is still freedom.



The illegitimate son of a Southern widow and a distinguished corporate lawyer, John Dos Passos always considered himself an outsider, a “man without a country,” a “double foreigner.” Perhaps it was the desire to overcome this enduring sense of isolation and loneliness that prompted him to chronicle American history and life. More than any other novelist of his generation, wrote Edmund Wilson in 1930, Dos Passos was “concerned with the larger questions of politics and society.”

Regarding capitalism as inhumane, Dos Passos championed the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a misjudgment he later attributed to the exuberance of youth and the allure of communist propaganda. His denunciation of the execution of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 and his exposure of the conditions among striking coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931 irrefutably established Dos Passos’s radical credentials. The publication of his U.S.A. trilogy between 1930 and 1936 further enhanced his reputation with modernist writers and proletarian intellectuals. Dos Passos’s relentless critique of capitalism led many to assume that he was a member of the Communist Party. He was not. Disturbed by the cruel suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion, Dos Passos had in fact begun to doubt the beneficence of the Soviet regime as early as 1921. A visit to Russia in 1928 and the Stalinist purges of the 1930s only confirmed his mounting suspicions. Outrage at the murder of his friend Jose Robles by communist secret police during the Spanish Civil War, and disgust at subsequent attempts to vilify Robles, ended Dos Passos’s romance with communism.

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