SOURCE: "Revisiting Dos Passos' U.S.A.;' in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XX, No. 3, Autumn, 1979, pp. 401-15.

[In the following essay, Levin discusses the political beliefs of John Dos Passos, particularly in U.S.A.]

John Dos Passos' reputation reached its highest point in 1938, when Jean-Paul Sartre—reviewing the French translation of Nineteen Nineteen—proclaimed him without reservation "the greatest writer of our time." Sartre's critical attitudes have always been dictated by the personal or dialectical use he could make of his subjects, and he went on to imitate Dos Passos' method in his own unfinished tetralogy, Les Chemins de la liberté. He might not have considered that method so uniquely experimental if he had had any firsthand acquaintance with Ulysses (and Joyce was then still alive). But much of Nineteen Nineteen had the advantage, from Sartre's point of view, of being set in France. Insofar as he was interested in the larger patterns of interrelated lives, of course he could have found a precedent within that strong tradition of French fiction which had its fountainhead in the Comédie humaine and its contemporary manifestation in Jules Romains' roman-fleuve. And, as Claude-Edmonde Magny would be pointing out in L'Age du roman américain (which in turn would influence the emergent nouveau roman), the novel had to register the impact of the cinema. Yet Nineteen Nineteen, doubtless because of its sharp confrontations between history and consciousness, fitted in particularly well with Sartre's existentialist position.

Born and nurtured as a romantic individualist, Dos Passos had to work his way toward facing the problems of modern collectivity. His development can be traced from his poems, plays, and travelogues through his two early war novels to his fictional encounters with the city in Streets of Night and Manhattan Transfer, which Lionel Trilling would hail as perhaps "the most important novel of the decade." When we recall that An American Tragedy and The Great Gatsby were also published in that same year, or that the decade had already produced The Age of Innocence and Main Street and would soon be producing A Farewell to Arms and The Sound and the Fury, we need make no further comment on the vicissitudes of taste. But it was probably Manhattan Transfer that went farthest to shock the traditionalists, provoking Paul Elmer More to dismiss it as "an explosion in a cess-pool." The more salubrious reaction of Sinclair Lewis may help us to recapture the sense of novelty that it conveyed to sensibilities yet unblurred by nearly a century of metropolitan fiction. Here was, according to Lewis, "the first book to catch Manhattan . . . Here is the city, the smell of it, the sound of it, the harsh and shining sight of it." After all, The New Yorker likewise made its first appearance in that annus mirabilis, 1925.

Sartre would set his seal of world acclaim on the middle volume of U.S.A., and Dos Passos would win the Feltrinelli if not the Nobel Prize, which has been awarded to many a lesser figure. His decline in standing, during the latter part of his career, was dramatically paralleled by the 180-degree shift in his political orientation. He could scarcely be blamed for sometimes feeling that critics, most of them still more or less liberal, were penalizing him for his congealing conservatism. He rationalized his claims to consistency by restudying Jefferson and the civic fathers in such books as The Ground We Stand On. But, as F. O. Matthiessen was able to retort: "They are the ground we stood on a long time ago, before the industrial transformation of our modern world." Moreover, the actual effects of that transformation had been the primary themes of Dos Passos as a novelist. Certain resources of novelistic compassion seem to have withered away, in the process that turned a young man arrested for protesting the Sacco-Vanzetti decision into an old man condoning the Kent State shootings. His second trilogy, District of Columbia, is at best a dim sequel to the first; and although Mid-Century returns to the documentaries and biographies of U.S.A., significantly it omits the lyrical self-intimations.

Yet there had to be some continuity in which U.S.A. was pivotal, if only because it had been poised at a turning point between idealism and disillusionment. The expressionistic play that he wrote in college, The Moon Is a Gong, was retitled The Garbage Man for its off-Broadway production. Edmund Wilson's novel, I Thought of Daisy, sketches out a sympathetic portrait of Dos Passos in his Greenwich Village days: earnest, honest, shy, myopic, dedicated, self-denying, a poetic aesthete by temperament, willing himself by force of conscience to be a radical activist. His period of active radicalism started with the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and terminated with the defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, which for him was history's wrong turn, exacerbated by the Soviet betrayal of Marxist principles. That was precisely the interval that witnessed the writing of U.S.A. As late as 1939 he answered a questionnaire with this credo: "My sympathies lie with the private in the front line against the brass hat; with the hod-carrier against the straw-boss, or the walking delegate for that matter; with the laboratory worker against the stuffed shirt in a mortarboard; with the criminal against the cop." The 42nd Parallel contains a vignette from his Harvard days, contrasting the gentlemanly conformities with a millworkers' strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts.

He never strayed very far from such temperamental alignments, though his hatred of the bureaucracy would complicate them by making a bugbear out of the New Deal. Internal conflicts were bound to be reinforced by his mixed ancestry, his illegitimate birth, his upper-class education—not to mention his exposure to war. He had taken his first public stand in 1916 at the age of twenty, with an article for The New Republic entitled "Against American Literature." Characteristically it was the establishment that he opposed, in this case the Genteel Tradition, counterposing to it the modernist stance of Walt Whitman. "Our only substitute for dependence on the past is dependence on the future," declared the youthful Dos Passos. "Here our only poet found his true greatness." Forty years later, after reading Les Temps Modernes, he commented to Wilson: "In that connection I read over half of Democratic Vistas last night and found it much more based on realities than Sartre." The irony was that when the future toward which Whitman had looked—"Years of the Modern!"—arrived with the twentieth century, Dos Passos found it harder to contemplate than did his admirer, Sartre. To an inquiring student Dos Passos replied that the original slant of his work was "more likely to stem from Whitman (and perhaps Veblen) than from Marx."

Leaving Marx aside as a marginal though by no means irrelevant interest, we proceed through U.S.A. from the tutelage of Whitman to that of Thorstein Veblen. The prologue spelling out the title, added after these three novels were conjoined to form a trilogy, moves from the lonely mind of a young man walking "the night streets" to a collective memory of images and echoes: "But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people." This passage turns out to be nothing less than a poem in Whitman's magnanimous vein; and there are many other such fragments of poetry, notably the composite portrait of the Unknown Soldier that concludes the second volume, "The Body of an American." Dos Passos' democratic conception is rooted in a Whitmanesque unanimism, in the prefatory assumption of Leaves of Grass that the United States itself is potentially a great poem, worthy of "gigantic and generous treatment" within the total ambiance of its immediate present. Manhattan Transfer had comprised a kind of urban kaleidoscope. Now the panoramic subject matter, to be treated on a scale of 1500 pages, was a cross-section of the entire country during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Modestly conceiving himself as "a second-class historian," the author claimed firsthand access to his age through its language, and asked no more than that his novels be read as "contemporary chronicles."

One of his strengths was his keen reportorial talent for taking in and getting down a locale. Novelists do not have to be circumscribed by a single region, but most of them stick to certain particular backgrounds. Even Balzac hardly covered his lavishly chosen ground in such full detail and over so wide an area as Dos Passos did with his material. At an ever-accelerating pace he zigzags across the continent, with a dip into Mexico and Cuba and a fling at Europe. On the make, his personages gravitate toward a series of capitals, each of them a center for the powers that control American values, all described with atmospheric precision: finance (New York), politics (Washington), industry (Detroit), entertainment (Hollywood), recreation (Miami Beach). As with Manhattan Transfer, the titles are large connective symbols. The 42nd Parallel roughly runs through Chicago, where, incidentally, Dos Passos was born, eastward to Provincetown, where he did much of his writing, and westward to the Oregon forest, which flashes by in a last reminiscence of his Unknown Soldier. Nineteen Nineteen shifts the titular emphasis from a spatial latitude to a temporal axis. And climactically The Big Money, as a central metaphor, universalizes the profit motive and tightens the network of human relations through the cash nexus itself.

The 42nd Parallel begins, in a flush of expectation, by celebrating the turn of the century, and ends with the embarkation of troops for the First World War in 1917. Nineteen Nineteen, as the date suggests, is less preoccupied with the war itself (previously and more closely rendered in One Man's Initiation and Three Soldiers) than with its side-effects and disillusioning aftermath, signalized by the Disarmament Conference at Versailles. The Big Money deals with the following decade, the razzle-dazzle of the Twenties, the perturbation beneath the debonair surfaces of the so-called Jazz Age, ending with the Wall Street crash of 1929, and portending the strikes and breadlines of the Depression. Hence "this lousy superannuated hypertrophied hell-invented novel," as Dos Passos deprecated it in a letter to Ernest Hemingway, was put together just a few years after the incidents it chronicles. Yet it was conceived and executed as a historical novel, bearing witness to its epoch. Like its greatest prototype in that mode, Tolstoy's War and Peace, U.S.A. is concerned with the interweaving and shaping of private existences by public events. Like Tolstoy, Dos Passos shows great respect for history, which is conscientiously presented—unlike E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime, who introduces historical figures and then irresponsibly casts them in fictitious roles.

Dos Passos' historicism sets up its social framework through a sequence of biographical sketches. Symmetrically spaced, there are nine of these in each volume, twenty-seven in all, related thematically as well as synchronically to the matter at hand. This assortment of highly typical and widely varied Americans ranges from international bankers (J. P. Morgan) to intransigent radicals (Eugene Debs), from prolific inventors (Thomas Edison) to eccentric artists (Isadora Duncan), from critical thinkers (Randolph Bourne) to film stars (Rudolph Valentino). Technological development has its outstanding proponents: the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, the efficiency expert F. W. Taylor, an ambivalent Henry Ford between his "tin lizzie" and his antique collection. Journalism has its playboy in John Reed and its bullyboy in William Randolph Hearst. (Dos Passos' characterization of the latter, "Poor Little Rich Boy," clearly lent inspiration to Citizen Kane.) Two presidents are represented: a mock-heroic Theodore Roosevelt and a Woodrow Wilson who comes near to being the arch-villain. "Meester Veelson"—the European accent reflects the hopes for a just peace that he betrayed, after betraying his promise of keeping America out of the war. Dos Passos felt peculiarly embittered, as did Hemingway, because that betrayal debased the language, reducing trusted ideals to rhetorical slogans.

U.S.A. is further structured by two formalized devices: the "Newsreel" and "The Camera Eye." Sixty-eight intermittent Newsreels (modeled on a medium then vital but soon obsolescent) frame the time-scheme objectively with reverberating quotations from subtitles, headlines, and popular songs. At the opposite extreme, the fifty-one Camera Eyes are candidly subjective and autobiographical, revealing the mind of the author himself at the moment of his narration. Though the term sounds mechanical, the textures can be rhapsodic; taken together, these passages might constitute Dos Passos' "Song of Myself." James T. Farrell preferred them to all the others, whereas Hemingway's preference was for the portraits from life. The striking—and slightly dampening—implication is that, between the detailed reportage on the one hand and the introspective evocation on the other, the middle territory of sheer fiction seems less arresting or memorable. One wonders how much force it would have carried if the narrative had been straight, without the interventions of collage or montage. Through the trilogy Dos Passos has dispersed a dozen imaginary case histories, five in each volume: six men, six women. The numerical disparity is accounted for by the fact that some drop out, while others enter late. Yet those who cease to be protagonists have walk-on parts in other episodes, so that their life-stories are continued from other viewpoints than their own.

Novels are invariably progressions from innocence to experience, and not less so when—with Proust—they span decades and volumes. Born on the Fourth of July in the century's dewy youth, J. Ward Morehouse is originally viewed through his own eyes as an idealistic highschool debater. Step by step, we watch him from the outside, as he climbs the careerist's ladder: helping to break the Homestead Strike, profiteering as a Dollar-a-Year-Man, pompously and smugly manipulating the wiles of public relations. In a parallel movement, Janey, whom we meet as a lively tomboy, subsequently crushed by the loss of a boyfriend, will reappear as Miss Williams, a colorless old maid and perfect secretary to the important Mr. Morehouse. Mobility goes downward for her brother Joe, who, after wartime adventures with the navy and the merchant marine, is ironically killed in a tavern brawl on Armistice night. Fainy McCreary, the likeable Irish-American printer's devil, is radicalized on his trek to San Francisco, but somehow makes his Mexican peace and disappears from the cycle. Two aspiring girls from different backgrounds in Chicago, Eleanor Stoddard and Eveline Hutchins, pass on from the local Art Institute via an interior decorating studio to intrigues in New York and Paris. Though they get harder and harder to tell apart, one is destined to marry a Russian prince and the other to commit suicide.

The most poignant of these character-sketches, which might stand by itself as a novella, comprises the two sections entitled "Daughter." Anne Elizabeth Trent, a headstrong Texas belle, conscience-stricken after her brother's death as a pilot in training, gets into social work and goes abroad as a postwar Red Cross aide. Made pregnant by an American officer, who temporizes because of other ambitions, she wildly persuades a half-drunk French aviator into looping the loop with her at night, and loses not her baby but her life. A single section is devoted to the radicalization of Ben Compton, a Jewish law student from Brooklyn who goes to jail for his pacifist convictions. Incidental glimpses afterward reveal him as a loyal member of the Communist Party who is ultimately expelled in a doctrinal purge. The comparable case of Mary French, who briefly takes up with Ben Compton at one point, is more fully developed. Ill at ease with the pretentious gentility of her mother, she drops out of Vassar to nurse her beloved doctor-father, who dies of influenza contracted from his patients. After an apprenticeship among the poor at Hull House, she drifts farther leftward: to radical journalism in Pittsburgh, labor organization in Washington, party work as a fellow traveler. Having rejected her family background and been rejected by her Communist lover, she is left to carry on alone.

If the book has any heroine, it is this committed fighter for losing causes, and much of the Sacco-Vanzetti agitation is witnessed from Mary's standpoint. Her opposite number, who also makes her debut in the third volume, is indeed a mock-heroine, a movie queen: the hard-boiled and easygoing Margo Dowling. Sex provides her sordid education; but she learns to use it; and she manages to rise through vaudeville, chorus lines, and nightclubs to the precarious heights of Hollywood stardom. On her way up, she has good-naturedly tried to alleviate the fate of Charley Anderson, which dominates The Big Money. That stalwart mechanic from North Dakota was left boarding a troopship at the conclusion of The 42nd Parallel. He does not appear in Nineteen Nineteen at all; he is too busy fighting and learning all about airplanes. Disembarking at the outset of The Big Money, he is now a veteran, a war hero, an ace from the Lafayette Escadrille, trying to realize that the war is over. Demobilization means demoralization for a while. Basically skilled and hard-working, however, he invents a new airplane motor. But an invention must not only be patented; it must be exploited, promoted, and capitalized; stock must be issued, and companies formed. Charley's mechanical know-how would be wasted without the entrepreneurial intercession of shrewd financiers and savvy lobbyists.

His own function, supervising production, inevitably takes him to Detroit, where he is taken up by the country club set. He makes a sort of allegorical choice, when he throws over the engineer's to marry the banker's daughter. He is still most comfortable when tinkering, in his overalls, with his foreman Bill Cermak. But Bill is killed and Charley is badly injured when their plane crashes in taking off for a trial flight. That crash on the runway is emblematic, not merely of Charley's anticlimactic fortunes, but of what will be happening in the stockmarket and throughout the business world. Things fall apart for Charley; his hollow marriage is wrecked; he himself becomes a human wreck, increasingly alcoholic and selfdestructive. Drifting down to Florida, where Margo moves in and out of his careening existence, he is fatally injured in a drunken automobile accident, and rival claimants beleaguer his hospital bed as his internal monologue tapers off. In five years, he has promised his assistant, they would be "in the big money"—as everyone has promised everyone else. Unpeeling a roll of fresh hundred-dollar bills, he was tempted to kiss them. "Gosh," he had said to himself at one moment, "money's a great thing." At another he has wished that "he didn't have to worry about money all the time," that instead "he was still tinkerin' with that damn motor."

As Margo Dowling had an opposite number in Mary French, so Charley Anderson has an anti-heroic foil in Richard Ellsworth Savage. He has begun as a well-connected poor relation, a sensitive Harvard poet, who graduates into the war and gets attached to the brass. After a number of safe and easy assignments behind the lines, he goes through the peace negotiations as aide-decamp to that ever-hustling arch-operator, J. Ward Morehouse, now in charge of opinion-molding for the postwar American public. Through that connection Dick is assured of a future, if not as a man of letters, then as heir apparent to a high-powered advertising agency, as a highly paid apologist for the ensuing materialistic boom. The moral crisis is underlined by his affair with Anne Elizabeth ("Daughter"); when he jilts her, his good faith lies among the casualties. When we take leave of him, in a cynical miasma of worldly success and self-hate, he is suffering the grimmest of hangovers, after a homosexual escapade in Harlem. Dos Passos' classmate, the poet Robert Hillyer, who actually returned to an academic post and took a narrowly traditional line, objected seriously to this character as a caricature of himself. Dos Passos responded, with the usual embarrassment prompted by such identifications à clef, that he had simply borrowed certain military associations, along with a few details from their common undergraduate memories.

We might come closer to the significance of Richard Ellsworth Savage if we consider him as an imaginary projection of Dos Passos himself—Dos Passos as he might have become, had he followed the code of snobbery and careerism, had his talent and integrity been compromised by the seductions of the big money, the acquisitive society, and the military-industrial complex. Edmund Wilson remarked that "humanity generally comes off badly" in Manhattan Transfer, and it would be hard to gainsay such an impression of U.S.A. All too many of its dramatis personae wind up as sellouts or losers, just as the war is sold out and the peace is lost. Sartre would interpret this permutation in Marxist terms: "In capitalist society, men do not have lives, they have only destinies." That is why these people seem shallow or two-dimensional, even when contrasted with their historic role-models. And, though we are not given profiles of Sacco or Vanzetti, we hear their voices out of the depths—quoted directly from their correspondence or, most powerfully, from the famous response of Bartolomeo Vanzetti to the death-sentence. Two Camera Eyes record Dos Passos' own emotions before and after the execution. In one he walks through Plymouth, where Vanzetti had worked, and likens those Italian immigrants to the earliest Pilgrim settlers. In the other, he angrily reacts to the defeat of justice: "all right we are two nations."

On a previous page a Camera Eye has recorded his insomniac misgivings, "peeling the speculative onion of doubt," as Peer Gynt did from layer to layer ("topdog? underdog?"). Against the natural grain of skeptical diffidence, "the internal agitator crazy to succeed" had forced Dos Passos to make a soapbox speech in Union Square. Painfully mulling it over, he confesses, "I go home after a drink and a hot meal and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial and ponder the course of history and what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy." Here is a pungent contrast: from Whitman to Martial, whom Dos Passos coupled in a letter with Juvenal, read in the same bilingual edition. Both of those Roman poets attest the decline from the virtues of the old Republic to the corruptions of their present Empire. The nostalgia for Whitman's vistas completes the American analogy. His impetus toward panegyric and rhapsody has been transposed into epigram and satire. The keen attraction that this last form held for Dos Passos made itself felt in his introduction to a portfolio of drawings by Georg Grosz, "Satire as a Way of Seeing," where he equated the satirist with the moralist. He identified his own outlook when he accepted the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, responding to William Faulkner's citation:

I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment. The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The only time he attains even fleeting popularity is when his works can be used by some particular faction as a stick to beat the brains out of their opponents. Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.

Dreiser called his most portentous novel An American Tragedy, and I suppose that title might subsume many of the destinies—not to say the lives—interwoven through U.S.A. Yet it might raise classical questions regarding the stature of the protagonist, since the characters so often seem to be dwarfed by their very multiplicity, if not by the Swiftian perspectives of the author. "We're living in one of the damndest tragic moments in history," he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald at about the time he was completing this trilogy. Its tragedy is that of America, and of the world itself. But there are times, he would have read in Juvenal, if he had not felt it in his bones, when it is difficult not to write satire. If the latter-day imperialism could not evoke the verse of a Juvenal or a Martial, then it needed something like the prose of a Petronius or a Tacitus. Given the extraordinary scope of U.S.A., there is an additional temptation—which Alfred Kazin has not resisted—to designate it as "a national epic." But critics should be able to discriminate, better than Hollywood press agents, among the fitting literary genres. We might well claim Moby-Dick as a national epic, or conceivably the Leatherstocking romances.

Other and later American novelists, sometimes rather self-consciously, have touched upon the heroic vein: Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather.

Not that U.S.A. is lacking in heroes, the underdogs to whom Dos Passos professed his own allegiance, and those who fought and spoke on their behalf: the Unknown Soldier, the legendary Joe Hill, the socialist Debs, the progressive Senator LaFollette, Big Bill Hayward of the I.W.W., Sacco, Vanzetti, and most incisively Veblen, who gradually becomes the presiding spirit. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, written during the composition of The Big Money, Dos Passos speaks of gathering ammunition from Veblen's socioeconomic analyses. As the ideologist of the fable, he had been situated to understand—much more comprehensively than Marx—the uses and abuses of technology, its relationship to human factors, and its vulnerability to sabotage at every level. His will included a caveat against any posthumous memoir, which Dos Passos has flouted in a brilliantly satirical psychograph, "The Bitter Drink." That beverage is the hemlock of Socrates, though it has been sipped in small doses and in sporadic classrooms by this twentieth-century gadfly. As a Norwegian-American compatriot of Ibsen, he has not only peeled the onion of doubt; he has slashed out against a shapeless and allenveloping monster, the Boyg—which Georg Brandes interpreted as the Spirit of Compromise. As a congenital nay-sayer, who "suffered from a constitutional inability to say yes," Veblen has his place with Hawthorne and Melville among the iconoclasts of American culture.

Coming closer to the United States than the Marxian class-struggle, the Veblenite antithesis is the tension between producing and consuming. The downfall of Charley Anderson, which Edmund Wilson regarded as "the best part" of the story, is exemplary in that respect. Charley is an inventor; he possesses Veblen's positive "instinct for workmanship." He has a flair for production, but no head for consumption, and consumption is the order of the day. Veblen's negative phrase, "conspicuous consumption," realizes itself in the national spree that Dos Passos satirizes. And, what is economically and politically worse, this is rooted in "conspicuous waste"—waste of energy, of resources, and of lives. "It's the waste," Mary French cries out bitterly in the last scene of the trilogy. "The food they waste and the money they waste while our people starve in tarpaper barracks." These conflicting issues are counterpoised in the epilogue, "Vag." Dos Passos, as a lifelong traveler, had played the vagabond. Here the valedictory young man, who hikes on the transcontinental highway as the young man in the prologue walked the city streets, could obviously be picked up and booked for vagrancy. The contrast, as he seeks to thumb a ride, is with the airline passengers overhead. There is no longer such a contrast today, when the norm of travel is by air, as there was forty years ago, when it was a luxury of the rich to be skyborne.

The decade of this work was the crucial one for commercial aviation, and one of Dos Passos' plays had been Airways, Inc. It is not a coincidence that the tragic fall of Charley Anderson or of "Daughter" should be literally enacted as an airplane crash. "Vag" is still vainly thumbing when the long-drawn-out chronicle draws to a close: "A hundred miles down the road." The road is still open nowadays, and the traffic has greatly increased. As a Harvard student, Dick Savage won a prize from The Reader's Digest for a sonnet sequence; but the editors wanted it to terminate on "a note of hope"; and he very readily supplied the amelioration, which may have been the first of his many intellectual compromises. Writing back to Malcolm Cowley, who seems to have wanted something more affirmative from The 42nd Parallel, Dos Passos promised "a certain amount of statement of position in the later Camera Eyes"—possibly what came out in regard to Sacco and Vanzetti, or what would be made more emphatic by his Veblenite adherence. "But as for the note of hope," he concluded in his sincere and straightforward way, "gosh who knows?" No novelist is under obligation to offer reforms or remedies for the state of affairs he undertakes to expose, and Dos Passos would be far less effective in making such an attempt than was his illustrious and wrong-headed predecessor, Tolstoy.

Veblen could have taught him the futility of his hope "to rebuild the past," to recover the "storybook democracy" of Whitman and Jefferson, and consequently have spared him the embarrassment of campaigning for Barry Goldwater. "The American Dream: What Has Happened to It?" This inquiry was raised in a pair of articles by Faulkner, who lectured and planned a book about it. It has been pursued, in one way or another, by many of the other major novelists of our century. The readiest instance may be the concluding page of The Great Gatsby, with its realization that "the last and greatest of all human dreams" has receded from the future into the past. If history has truly become a nightmare, better to reveal it than to keep it veiled in outworn fantasy. Speaking to the students of Choate School, after having received its Alumni Prize, Dos Passos affirmed:

Writing is and I guess it ought to be one of the hazardous professions.... The first thing a man—striving to come of age in any period of human history—has to do is to choose for himself what is true and what is not true, what is real and what is not real in the picture of society established for him by his elders. .. . In the search for truth there are no secret formulae that can be handed down from one generation to another. Truth I believe is absolute. Some things are true and some false. You have to find it.

No further explanation was necessary for presenting the panorama as he had found it in U.S.A. The achievement was that he had caught so very much of it, thereby enabling Lionel Trilling to say that the whole seemed greater than the sum of its parts. Dos Passos did not need to be—he should not have later become—an ideologue. He was always enough of a moralist to be a genuine satirist. As a reporter, he saw a story in everything, a connecting issue everywhere. As a technician, he developed his own new modes for expressing the complications of modernity.