Written in experimental, non-linear form, the trilogy blends elements of biography and news reports to paint a landscape of early 20th-century American culture.

His experiences during the Spanish Civil War disillusioned him with left-wing politics while also severing his relationship with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway.

[4] John Randolph Dos Passos was an authority on trusts, and a staunch supporter of the powerful industrial conglomerates that his son expressly criticized in his fictional works during the 1920s and 1930s.

His parents later arranged for him to travel with a private tutor on a six-month tour of France, England, Italy, Greece, and southwest Asia, to study the masters of classical art, architecture, and literature.

Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, One Man's Initiation: 1917, which was written in the trenches during World War I.

He wrote admiringly about the Industrial Workers of the World, and the injustice in the criminal convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and joined with other notable figures in the United States and Europe in a failed campaign to overturn their death sentences.

[8] In the following year, he wrote the screenplay for the film The Devil Is a Woman, starring Marlene Dietrich and directed by Josef von Sternberg, both exiles from Nazi Germany.

(In later years, Hemingway would give Dos Passos the derogatory moniker of "the pilot fish" in his memoir of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast.)

"[9] Dos Passos had attended the 1932 Democratic National Convention and subsequently wrote an article for The New Republic in which he harshly criticized the selection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the party's nominee.

[citation needed] In his novel The Big Money, he features a character who is an idealist Communist gradually worn down and destroyed by groupthink in the party.

As a result of socialism gaining popularity in Europe in response to the rise of fascism and Nazism, there was a sharp decline in international sales of his books.

His politics, which had always underpinned his work, moved to the right, and Dos Passos came to have a qualified, and temporary, sympathy for the goals of Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.

[15] In the same decade, he published the influential study The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (1954), about which fellow ex-radical Max Eastman wrote: "I think John Dos Passos has done a great service to his country and the free world by lending his talents to this task.

Over his long career, Dos Passos wrote over forty books,[18] as well as numerous poems, essays, and plays, and created more than 400 pieces of art.

Dos Passos used experimental techniques in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings, autobiography, biography, and fictional realism to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the 20th century.

The novel reflects the writer's sympathy, at the time of writing, for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and his outrage at its suppression, for which the book expresses a deep grudge against President Woodrow Wilson.

His art most often reflected his travels in Spain, Mexico, North Africa, plus the streets and cafés of the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris that he had frequented with good friends like Fernand Léger and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Blaise Cendrars, whose work he translated into English and who inspired him to use the montage techniques found in the U.S.A.

In early 2001, an exhibition titled The Art of John Dos Passos opened at the Queens Borough Library in New York City.

[21] In the television documentary, The Odyssey of John Dos Passos (1994), writer Norman Mailer said: "Those three volumes of U.S.A. make up the idea of a 'Great American Novel.

John Brunner's "non-novel" Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which won the Hugo Award, features his technique of using fictitious newspaper clippings, television announcements, and other "samples" taken from the news and entertainment media of the year 2010.

His short story "To Howard Hughes: A Modest Proposal" (1974) explored a wealthy man reacting to the threat of war by wielding the power of private atomic reaction.

[24] The John Dos Passos Prize is a literary award given annually by the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University.