Century's Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle

by John Dos Passos

Book by Passos, John Dos

474 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1975

About the author

John Dos Passos was a prominent American novelist, artist, and political thinker best known for his U.S.A. trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—a groundbreaking work of modernist fiction that employed experimental narrative techniques to depict the complexities of early 20th-century American life. Born in Chicago in 1896, he was educated at Harvard and served as an ambulance driver during World War I, experiences that deeply influenced his early literary themes. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, and the antiwar Three Soldiers drew on his wartime observations and marked him as a major voice among the Lost Generation.
Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer brought him widespread recognition and introduced stylistic innovations that would define his later work. His U.S.A. trilogy fused fiction, biography, newsreel-style reportage, and autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections to explore the impact of capitalism, war, and political disillusionment on the American psyche. Once aligned with leftist politics, Dos Passos grew increasingly disillusioned with Communism, especially after the murder of his friend José Robles during the Spanish Civil War—a turning point that led to a break with Ernest Hemingway and a sharp turn toward conservatism.
Throughout his career, Dos Passos remained politically engaged, writing essays, journalism, and historical studies while also campaigning for right-leaning figures like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s. He contributed to publications such as American Heritage, National Review, and The Freeman, and published over forty books including biographies and historical reflections. Despite political shifts, his commitment to liberty and skepticism of authoritarianism remained central themes.
Also a visual artist, Dos Passos created cover art and illustrations for many of his own books, exhibiting a style influenced by modernist European art. Though less acclaimed for his painting, he remained artistically active throughout his life. His multidisciplinary approach and innovations in narrative structure influenced numerous writers and filmmakers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer and Adam Curtis.
Later recognized with the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for literature in 1967, Dos Passos’s legacy endures through his literary innovations and sharp commentary on American identity. He died in 1970, leaving behind a vast and diverse body of work that continues to shape the landscape of American fiction.

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dos Passos is a bit of a neglected writer among major 20th century American novelists. His trilogy USA, comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936), is one of my favorite American works of fiction, a brilliant panoramic epic with modernist literary devices (newsreels, a kind of found art collage of headlines, newspaper leads, snatches of song lyrics, advertising slogans, and other bits and pieces of Americana; camera eye, periodic autobiographical stream of conscience set pieces; and thumbnail biographies of emblematic figures). I’m particularly fond of the old Signet paperback editions, which contained splendidly evocative line drawings by Reginald Marsh. He also wrote tons of non-fiction, some plays, poetry, and numerous other novels before and after USA, most of it not as good as his masterpiece.

Century’s Ebb was his unfinished last novel and its sub-title The Thirteenth Chronicle is intended to align the bulk of Dos Passos’s fiction into an extended sequence that navigates themes in American history from the decades before the Civil War to the moon landing. But Century’s Ebb was not finished, despite its publisher’s 1975 claim that it was “done,” just not blessed with the kinds of changes and adjustments that might happen via interaction between writer and editor as the manuscript moves typescript to galleys to finished book. Nor did the surviving editor do much to help Dos Passos’s manuscript…things large and small annoy. Dos Passos used the thumbnail biography device in Century’s Ebb as he did in USA. At one stretch three of them follow one on the other, a repetition of a device that didn’t bog down USA, where the shuffling of different devices provide its own kind of rhythm. Here you feel as if you stumbled into an encyclopedia by mistake. A careful reading of the manuscript and the knowledge that fixing this would have been one of the things Dos Passos would have attended to had he not died should have provided permission to sequence the existing text a little differently. Also, since both real and fictional characters inhabit the novel, it wouldn’t have been intrusive if the editor had corrected Dos Passos’s mis-identification of the co-author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X as Max Haley. And, while this is surely a quibble, when a fictional Ernest Hemingway, called George Elbert Warner here, appears in a novel perhaps the real Ernest Hemingway should not be referenced in an inconsequential way. Warner and the Dos Passos stand-in Jay Pignatelli, re-enact the two American writers’ friendship and the fallout they had over the Spanish Civil War. So why in a scene where someone at a party is reading a short story out loud is it a story by Ernest Hemingway. Why not change Hemingway to Warner or have the story be by Fitzgerald or Porter or Faulkner? It’s a silly sloppiness in the editing that ends up maximizing the injustices in publishing unfinished works after a novelist’s death.

Dos Passos famously drifted from far left of center in politics to far right, someone who wrote pamphlets and marched for Sacco and Vanzetti, who voted for the Communist candidate in the 1932 election over FDR, who worked for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War but became a supporter of William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater in the final decades of his life. This shift is paralleled a bit in Century’s Ebb. Jay’s journey is more to center than fully to the right, and like Dos Passos he doesn’t surrender his disdain for dogma or bullying, though he does include an unconvincingly apologetic thumbnail bio of Joe McCarthy as a battered, self-destructive regular guy who was right about the Communists under the bed. Dos Passos was a socialist whose leftist views didn’t prevent him from seeing what other lefties saw too late in the Soviet Union. In 1935 he wrote “I’m now at last convinced that means can’t be disassociated from ends and that massacre only creates more massacre and oppression more oppression and means become ends.” From the Spanish Civil War on, he was unreservedly anti-Communist. This is in Century’s Ebb but overall the politics in the novel is more reflective of a consistent commitment to justice, to freedom of speech, respect for the average American, and to those who tackle tough and unpopular causes. After reading the McCarthy chapter I was more than a little nervous about the chapter on the Kennedy assassination and the murder of Malcolm X. But both were well-written, even handed, and thoughtful. The first was mostly about Oswald and is a pretty good antidote to conspiracy theorists of left and right; the second admires the journey the black activist takes from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red to Malcolm X to El Hajj Malik el-Shabbaz. Perhaps he admires it because it’s a journey, like Jay’s and the author’s own journey, through personal and world history to greater wisdom and tolerance.

Century’s Ebb travels a course of American history from the late 19th century, largely courtesy of Walt Whitman, to the moon landing, but concentrates on the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and the first years of the 60s. There are emblematic fictional narratives that feature a corporate boy wonder who over-reached his creative management of funds, causing him to face arrest or flee the country, a young couple of liberal politics who come to Washington and lose their way, and the autobiographical sections of Jay Pignatelli. These latter sections read like a roman a clef—you recognize Hemingway, Hellman, Parker, Picasso, Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn-born bullfighter, and others. As they did in USA some of the narrative threads come together in places (Jay helps Danny Delong escape from Spain during the civil war when he unwittingly faced purging; decades later Delong tries to enlist Jay has his lawyer). Because the novel was not finished there are awkward structural moments and bits of prose that would have (and should have) been cleaned up and things missing but what they are is anyone’s guess, only the holes are visible not what would have occupied them. But, if you’re a fan of Dos Passos, of 20th Century American literature and history, there are rewards, and frequent ones, here. The writing is often first-rate. The breadth of field is impressive. And the iconoclastic, yet compassionate, perspective unique.

[Sheri Hazeltine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, it was a historical review of the 20th century from the early 1900s to 1970, along with personal autobiographical snippets of his own life. I love his writing.👍🏻🤗