John Passos: 35 books

This selective history of Portugal reflects the author’s fascination with his own Portuguese/Madeiran heritage. The work tracks the nation’s rise and fall as a world power, drawing from the author’s travels and archival research. “Dos Passos,” writes historian J. H. Plumb, “brings...

A record of his childhood, young adulthood, and twenties, The Best Times is a collage of cherished memories. He reflects on the joys of an itinerant life enriched by new and diverse friendships, customs, cultures, and cuisines. Luminary personalities and landscapes abound in the 1920s literary...

Though best known as a novelist, Dos Passos was also a talented poet, as this 1922 volume of travel poems demonstrates.  The contents are: "Winter in Castile," "Nights at Bassano," "Vagones de Tercera," "Quai de la Tournelle," "On Foreign Travel," and "Phases of the Moon."

Tyler Spotswood, an alcoholic campaign manager, helps elect a corrupt Southern politician to the U.S. Senate. When his boss, Chuck Crawford aka “Number One,” pins a scandal on Spotswood, Tyler is too drunk to blow the whistle. Number One draws many comparisons to Robert Penn Warren’s All the...

Published in 1920, this impressionistic first novel by the celebrated author of the U. S. A. Trilogy is a harrowing portrait of ambulance drivers in France during World War I.  Based on the author's own wartime experiences, it is deeply felt but never maudlin, capturing the raw ambiguities of war with unflinching honesty. 

In the huge shed of the wharf, piled with crates and baggage, broken by gang-planks leading up to ships on either side, a band plays a tinselly Hawaiian tune; people are dancing in and out among the piles of trunks and boxes. There is a scattering of khaki uniforms, and many young men stand in groups...

This 1922 work uses the resources of both fiction and travel writing to channel the spirit of Don Quixote in its tale of two wanderers trekking on foot from Madrid to Toledo in the aftermath of World War I.  Chapters are interwoven with critical and biographical essays of notable Spanish writers of the time.