A close look at the emotional and intellectual world of writer John Dos Passos, who was at one time America’s leading modernist, that reveals the political and cultural rhythms of the twentieth century.

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was a prolific writer—at once compulsive and enigmatic—who became famous in the 1930s as America’s leading literary modernist, only to be eclipsed in the second half of his life because of his own political and aesthetic choices. The Rage of John Dos Passos adopts a psychoanalytic perspective to comprehend the curious career of a man whom Jean-Paul Sartre described in 1938 as “the greatest writer of our time.” 

As a young man after World War I, Dos Passos wrote books that won him notoriety as an intemperate critic of American society. His Three Soldiers (1921) was called an insult to the army in which he had been enlisted. His impressionistic novel of New York City, Manhattan Transfer (1925), was dismissed as “spattered filth.” Then in the 1930s, three wildly creative and politically engaged novels written under the collective title U.S.A. truly made his name. Yet Dos Passos then abandoned his youthful radicalism to embrace strident anticommunism and the second Red Scare. 

The Rage of John Dos Passos examines the central strands of the author’s life, from infancy until death, and the full range of his writing, including his often-scorned late novels. Christopher Tomlins aims to fuse history, biography, and literary analysis in understanding Dos Passos and his times—and our own. 

Christopher Tomlins is the James W. and Isabel Coffroth Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including, most recently, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865, and In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History.

Prelude: A Child Forlorn

I. Foundling, Modernist
One. The Name of the Father
Two. The Symbolic Order
Three. Do You Sincerely Want to Be Radical?
Four. The I of the Beholder

Intermission: A Man Without a Country

II. American, Embattled
Five. Goodbye to All That: Modernism Becomes Dreamworld
Six. Outfitting Dreamworld: Falling in Love with America
Seven. Populating Dreamworld: Assessments of Self and Others
Eight. The Winter of Our Dreams

Finale: To The Road, Again

A Note on Epigraphs
Notes
Index