John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896 – September 28,1970) was an American novelist best known for his books Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925), and the three novels in his U.S.A. trilogy, The 42^nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936).  He was born out of wedlock in Chicago; his father was a trust attorney of half Portuguese and Madeiran descent and his mother was a Virginian. He attended Choate School and Harvard College. After graduation in 1916 he left to study architecture and art in Spain. Within a year he had joined the Ambulance Corps and remained in Paris after the war studying anthropology at the Sorbonne. As a young man Dos Passos was an ardent social revolutionary who believed America was two nations, one rich and one poor. He traveled to Russia to study socialism in 1928 and was a leader of the left-leaning League of American Writers in the1930’s.  He soured on communism and socialism when his friend Jose Robles was murdered during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and as censorship and abridgement of civil liberties increasingly prevailed. His views moved steadily to the political right as he grew older.  His last major work was an influential study The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (1954).  Norman Mailer said that “those three volumes of U.S.A. makeup the idea of a ‘Great American novel’”. The Modern Library listed U.S.A. Trilogy at number 23 on its 1998 list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20^th century.