John Dos Passos was. The Lost Generation writer, best known for the left-leaning U.S.A. trilogy of novels, was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1896 but raised by a mother from Petersburg, Virginia. In 1949, after a long legal battle, he was able to establish claim to his father’s farm at Spence’s Point in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and he moved there from Baltimore, Maryland. A reporter who tracked Dos Passos down in Virginia wrote, “The idea of a so-called leftist novelist coming to live in ultra-Virginia Westmoreland County might seem surprising, but in the house at Spence’s Point and in the gray fields which stretch away from it, the author . . . seems as authentic a part of the landscape as the cedars that line the fields.” Ironically, it was just at this time that Dos Passos’s politics were taking a turn to the right. He loathed bureaucratic encroachment on liberty and supported the conservative Democrat Harry F. Byrd. He studied and chronicled the meaning of liberty as espoused by America’s founding fathers, and especially Thomas Jefferson, whose philosophy he admired. Sadly, Dos Passos’s work—by wide critical consensus—also became flat and didactic.
Further Reading:
- Virginia Spencer Carr, Dos Passos: A Life (1984)
- Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (1980)
This Vignette Provided By
Erika Howsare
