John Dos Passos: One Man, One Life

Of all those individuals who supported and contributed to national review in its early years and who, in so doing, helped raise to a national and even international level an awareness of traditional values and an informed consciousness of the tides of history, none brought more impressive credentials or more experience than did John Dos Passos.

“Dos,” as his friends called him and as he frequently signed himself, had in 1947 been elected to Chair 14 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters—a seat formerly occupied by Theodore Roosevelt and Willa Cather, among others. And he was to receive the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, from the hand of William Faulkner, who, bored by stem-winding speeches, thrust the medal at Dos Passos and said only, “Nobody deserved it more or had to wait for it longer.”

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J. O. Tate

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Of all those individuals who supported and contributed to national review in its early years and who, in so doing, helped raise to a national and even international level an awareness of traditional values and an informed consciousness of the tides of history, none brought more impressive credentials or more experience than did John Dos Passos.

“Dos,” as his friends called him and as he frequently signed himself, had in 1947 been elected to Chair 14 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters—a seat formerly occupied by Theodore Roosevelt and Willa Cather, among others. And he was to receive the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, from the hand of William Faulkner, who, bored by stem-winding speeches, thrust the medal at Dos Passos and said only, “Nobody deserved it more or had to wait for it longer.”