DOS Passos: A Life

I compare the 1984 printing of Carr's biography to the other standard study by Townsend Ludington; I do not think that Carr's recent reprinting substantially differs in the body of the contents from the original edition. It appears a preface has been added by Donald Pizer to the paperback. Townsend Ludington's 1980 and Virginia Spencer Carr's 1984 volumes weigh in about the same, over five hundred pages of closely printed text. I have the hardcovers, although both biographies have appeared in paperback reprints, Ludington's a decade ago and Carr a few years back. Despite his earlier works being edited by Ludington in three handsome installments in the Library of America series in the past few years, even these languish, absent even from the giant city libraries near me. Outside of nods to the USA trilogy or maybe "Manhattan Transfer" or in a pinch, "Three Soldiers," not many readers bother with him. Conventional wisdom, shared even by his admirers, tends to denigrate his later novels and histories and biographies, after his gradual embrace of "middle-class liberalism" after his disillusionment with the manipulation of the Left by Stalinists in the 1920s and 1930s. None of his works remain in print which were written after his fall from favor with the Left. The Library of America selections span the twenties and thirties, and it's for his rendering of the ideas, events, and trends of the first three decades of the last century that Dos Passos will be remembered. Like many writers who outlasted their early impact and kept at it, he resented being labelled the "USA" author forty years later, but without this contribution to American literature, there'd be no pair of hefty biographies on my shelf or any other that matter over a century after his birth. Few today may read Dos Passos, at least in America, but as with Jack London, Upton Sinclair, or James T. Farrell, this one time literary lion of the Left inspired many in Europe and the Third World with his chronicles that mingled a Camera Eye of the passing scene, a mordant Newsreel span of current events from the Wilson-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years, and meticulously observed, if often distant and mechanical, scurryings of individuals as they resisted the machinations of "competitive Capital," "Monopoly Capital," and the triumph of the Organization Man, with "the big money." Ludington gains the edge over Carr for his diligent incorporation of Dos Passos' correspondence, which he corrected from its previous printing as the collected letters. Carr earns her merit by adding the letters to DP, from his agent Bernice Baumgartner, his first wife Katy, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and others who hated and loved DP. Ludington tends to concentrate more on DP's own career; Carr expands to notice, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald complaining to Max Perkins about sales of "Tender is the Night" vs. "1919," or Edmund Wilson's sangfroid in his letters vs. his astonishing poverty at one point. Neither biograph