Dos Passos

Virginia Spencer Carr was formerly the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Chair of English Letters at Georgia State University. Her other works include the forthcoming Paul Bowles: A Life (Scribner, 2004), Understanding Carson McCullers (South Carolina, 1991), and The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Doubleday, 1975), winner of the Francis Butler Simkins Prize of the Southern Historical Society and Longwood College. Carr lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Fascinating. It gives us a clearer sense than ever before of what a bizarre personal life lay behind his bitter views of public life.... Thanks to Mrs. Carr's stylishly-written, fact-crammed biography, it is now possible to put together a more plausible explanation of Dos Passos's political odyssey. - Kenneth S. Lynn, New York Times Book Review; ""The virtues of this biography result largely from Carr's carefully establishing the facts of Dos Passos's visible progress through the world, including his many travels.... The figure who emerges from this welter of information is thoroughly human and is a sensible and likable and even admirable person."" - Washington Post; ""[A] solid, detailed biography that attempts to understand not only the novelist but the highly political man who found himself in no man's land: 'too liberal for the conservatives, too conservative for the liberals.' "" - National Review; ""Many readers will be most impressed by her inclusion of his lively, funny exchanges of letters with Edmund Wilson and her accounts of his nearly lifelong off-and-on again friendship with Ernest Hemingway."" - Bruce Allen, Smithsonian; ""To Mr. Dos Passos, the sacrificing of means to ends made no sense.... Time and again reading Miss Carr's book, one is reminded that here was an eminently humane, reasonable man."" - Colin Walters, Washington Times