Manhattan transfer

About Author

John Dos Passos was born in Chicago in 1896 of Portuguese descent. His father was an eminent lawyer and he was educated at the Chaote School and then at Harvard, graduating in 1916. After the First World War – during which he served in the US Army Medical Corps – he was a freelance correspondent in Spain and the Near East before settling down to the writing of books. In 1922 he published a volume of poetry and a collection of essays which explored the Spanish culture. In 1925 he published Manhattan Transfer his first experimental novel in what was to become his peculiar style – a mixture of fact and fiction. He began his panoramic epics of American life with the USA trilogy written using the same technique and tracing, through interwoven biographies, the story of America from the early twentieth century to the onset of the Depression in 1929. Then came the District of Columbia trilogy, which is a fictionalized social history of America in the thirties and forties. During the Second World War Dos Passos became a war correspondent in the Pacific for Life Magazine.

In later years John Dos Passos published a number of historical works dealing with the founding of the United States: The Ground We Stand On, The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson, The Men Who Made This Nation and The Shackles of Power.

His most permanent home was his father’s farm in Tidewater, Virginia. He died in 1970.

Jay McInerney was born in 1955. He has written fiction for magazines such as Esquire and Atlantic and is the author of the novels Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; The Last of the Savages and Model Behaviour, a number of which are published in Penguin. He also edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices and he wrote the screenplay for the film version of Bright Lights, Big City.