Dated now and with references to people and events that are close to forgotten.
I had read the trilogy "USA" in 1972 and thought it was revolutionary writing and loved its locomotive narrative.
Dos Passos' diaries and letters are worth reading. He comes across as a retiring thoughtful man with a genius for inventive expression and someone keen for experience.
We follow his development from student to volunteer ambulance service in Europe and Army service in World War I. He was a frequent traveller always interested in how the working citizen was being influenced by the mass movements of the first half of the Twentieth Century.
Over a lifetime Dos Passos gave away his socialist beliefs to such an extent that he ended up a Goldwater advocate in 1964. This change was influenced by his ever growing distrust of communism and political "isms".
There is wonderful correspondence with Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Fitzgerald and E.E. Cummings to mention the most well-known.
His life at Harvard, travels in Spain, the Near East and Russia, the USA in the Thirties, the Spanish Civil War (where his disquiet with communism was fully realized) and post World War II are all covered.
He was often in straitened circumstances (the correspondence often shows him requesting a loan of a couple of hundred dollars to tide him over). He suffered ill-heath for decades and tragedy struck when his first wife was killed in a car crash. To the end of his days he remained an affectionate man with a healthy capacity for disbelief in the prevailing discourse.
Each period of his life is provided with an introductory piece by the editor in the form of a biographical narrative.
Good reading.