I am willing to do it, but I have no e-mail address for him. It seems to me that commenters’ e-mail addresses are only visible to you as manager/owner of the website, not to other commenters.

You have ny e-mail address, so if you prefer to respond there please do so.

How are you getting on with your project for “a later post” ? It is now somewhat later….
all the best, R

maybe dP figures US art only begins with Rothko.
I don’t think Rothko (born 1903) would have been known to dP when “USA” was being written.

There aren’t any music people. dP quotes at least one Irving Berlin song (“Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning”) but doesn’t examine Berlin himself or any of the other people who supplied to music track to his period: Scott Joplin, Victor Herbert, Rudy Vallee, Bessie Smith etc.

But without having read the scholarly material, but as a lifelong admirer of the trilogy, I’m not sure the biographies are supposed to “stand in” for American history; I think the subjects are meant to be representative figures, but that’s not quite the same thing.

I’ve just come across your June posts. I would be VERY grateful for a PDF of “Peter Glenn Christensen’s 1982 article ‘Dos Passos’ Use of Biography in USA’”.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to the archive.

If you could send me a copy, it would be GREAT.

Many thanks,

Bob McAnulty

Apart from that, I am doing a PhD dissertation on power and crisis in American political and economic life between 1890 and 1920. “U.S.A.” is both satire and portrait of the period: in other words, it is a good way to get into interpreting the political culture using an emotional (feelings-based) entry point, thus complementing the more conventional analytical approaches found in history or political science texts.

It is worth recalling that Dos Passos was nearly always short of money, so to earn some extra $ he published many of these biographies separately in journals or as separate volumes, before the individual volumes of U.S.A., and perhaps in a hurry. His biography of Veblen, for example, which also appeared as a separate volume, has been criticized as being too derivative, too willing to rely uncriticaly on the “official” bio by Joseph Dorfman, who may well have been unsymapthetic to his subject. On this see Bartley and Bartley “Stigmatizing Thorstein Veblen: A Study in the Confection of Academic Reputations” in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 14#2 (December 2000):363-400

best wishes
Richard

Goldman I think is covered by the Wobblies–interesting at how many wobblies dP included versus straight up commies. S&V are, of course, key figures in The Big Money, so their absence makes sense. Furthermore, I think that dP chose people with long, extended careers/influence, though you could say Joe Hill (and Reed, maybe and/or Duncan) didn’t have that. I like that Paxton Hibben is totally off the map–no wiki entry, no nothing, save what appears to be a vanity press bio of the man. Dude wrote some seriously important books, apparently, but now he’s just the dude who wrote those books.

Wright I think counts for architect enough. As for painter, maybe dP figures US art only begins with Rothko.

Haymarket predates the historic scope, and we’ve got martyrs aplenty in Hill, Everest, Debs (for sedition), and Big Bill. It’s notable that the trilogy begins with the bombing of the Maine–er, no, the charge up San Juan Hill, so Haymarket is definitely too soon.

Local politicians would also undermine the scope a bit, too. Locally important, but not nationally. Note that, I think, every politician mentioned at least ran for president.

More thoughts when I’m not on deadline with a copyediting thing. This post rules.