John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was born in Chicago and educated at Harvard University. After graduating from college, he went to Europe and served in World War I as an ambulance driver and a medic. His wartime experiences provided the basis for One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1919) and Three Soldiers (1921). In his first great novel Manhattan Transfer (1925) and in his three-volume U.S.A. (1938), Dos Passos created epic portraits of American life by telling many interrelated or parallel stories.

U.S.A., which consists of The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money, is Dos Passos's major contribution to Modernism, the twentieth-century artistic movement characterized by experiments in form, impersonality, and extensive use of allusion. In the three U.S.A. volumes, Dos Passos created personal commentaries called "The Camera Eye." He also created a new fictional form, the newsreel, modeled on the newsreels that, prior to the introduction of television, were shown before featured films in movie houses. Dos Passos's newsreels were collages, reminiscent of the work of such Modernist painters as Picasso and Braque. They contained bits and pieces of the popular culture, including headlines, advertising slogans, jingles, common sayings of the time, and excerpts from conversations and speeches. The total effect was to create an overall portrait of the country in the early part of this century.