John Dos Passos papers

John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was one of the major novelists of the post-World War I Lost Generation that included authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Sherwood Anderson. After graduating from Harvard University in 1916, he volunteered to be an ambulance driver in World War I. His experiences there led to the bitter antiwar novel Three Soldiers (1921). In the postwar years he also produced his trilogy U. S. A., which consists of The 42nd Parallel (1930); 1919 (1932); and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos worked as a newspaper correspondent during World War II and continued to write novels after the war. He published forty-two novels, as well as poems, essays, and plays. He was also a student of art and created and exhibited more than 400 pieces of art. The Dos Passos papers include manuscripts and notes relating to his translation of Panama; or, The Adventures of My Seven Uncles (1931), his play Fortune Heights (1934), and his novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), as well as correspondence and manuscripts related to his work in the theater.