DOS PASSOS, the Critics, and the Writer's Intention [antikvár]

Preface To those of us who were keeping up with contemporary novels in high school in the 1920s, John Dos Passos seemed to be an important writer. Some of us didn't read Three Soldiers (1921) until several years after it came out, but when we did discover the book, it was a shock, for as small children we had been told that the Allied cause in the First World War was a holy one. Our fathers had been on the Western Front, and at home the incessant anti-German propaganda reached all of us. Then, a few years later. Three Soldiers seemed to be saying that the American army had been a little less than glorious in the war and in its aftermath. The book apparently didn't make a full impression on American readers; it was not until 1929 that war novels became popular, with Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Aldington's Death of a Hero, and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. But Three Soldiers deserves better than Hemingway's curt dismissal of it in the introduction to his 1^42 anthology, Men at War. He asserted that he had reread Three Soldiers and rather sneeringly said it didn't hold up across the years. Of course Hemingway was often mean minded, and in the recent Spanish war he had quarreled with Dos Passos. In 1951, Dos Passos' portrait of him in a rather poor novel, Chosen Country, infuriated Hemingway. But Dos Passos was a magnanimous man, and shortly before Hemingway's death he received a friendly little note from Dos Passos. Back to our high-school readers: Manhattan Transfer