A NEAR FINE FIRST NO DJ.


one poem begins "Beer is free to soldiers"

Dos Passos volunteered in July 1917 for the S.S.U. 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with friends E. E. Cummings and Robert Hillyer. He worked as a driver in Paris, France, and in north-central Italy.

By the late summer of 1918, he had completed a draft of his first novel. At the same time, he had to report for duty with the U.S. Army Medical Corps at Camp Crane in Pennsylvania. At war's end, he was stationed in Paris,


Dos Passos, of course, began his writing career as a poet, publishing Eight Harvard Poets in 1917 and A Pushcart at the Curb in 1922, both of which contain a wide assortment of imagist and free-form poems. While there is, as Linda Wagner argues in The Modern American Novel, "ample proof" that Dos Passos "was a staunch admirer of Ezra Pound" (28), this is only part of the formative influence story. At the end of her "modernist-imagist" argument, Wagner asserts: