Dos Passos' father was a wealthy Chicago lawyer. After attending Harvard, Dos Passos served as an ambulance driver in World War I and later became a journalist.
He gradually came to see the United States as two nations, one rich and one poor.
His major work is the unique and memorable trilogy U.S.A, comprised of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos used an experimental technique in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings, diary entries, and the like to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the Twentieth Century.
Major works :