John Dos Passos on "Lord Jim"

When Doubleday, Page & Company began reprinting Joseph Conrad's works in America in 1914, they introduced his books to a new generation of American readers, many of whom would go on to become writers themselves. Authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Penn Warren all acknowledged the importance Conrad's fiction had on their writing, and it is easy to see how works such as The Great Gatsby and All the King's Men were modelled on the example provided by Lord Jim and Nostromo. One writer who is usually not seen as being influenced by Conrad is John Dos Passos, best known for his novels Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925), and the U S. A. trilogy (1930-36). But this view must be modified in light of Dos Passos's review of the 1914 Doubleday, Page reprint of Lord Jim. Dos Passos's essay appeared in the July 1915 issue of the Harvard Monthly. At the time, he was a senior at Harvard and the Monthly's editor. As Townsend Luddington, one of Dos Passos's biographers, notes, much of his time at Harvard was spent reading works not assigned for his classes and serving his literary apprenticeship with the Monthly: "The spring of 1915 he read more of the moderns ... He read much of Samuel Butler, Compton Mackenzie, Conrad, de Maupassant, Meredith, and Synge, among others" (1980, 64-65). The articles he wrote on these authors reflected "an enthusiasm for the new and unconventional: a new literary subject here, a new technique there" (Pizer 1988, 12). Dos Passos's essay on Lord Jim shows him to be an unusually perceptive reader. Unlike many, he did not emphasize Conrad's role as a writer of adventures. Dos Passos instead drew attention to Conrad's skill at handling a plot that does not follow a strict chronological order and his adeptness at switching point of view. Of particular interest to Dos Passos is the way Conrad created characters, noting that they "emerge with vivid distinctness."