Summary
Summary
After meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense twenty-year friendship and write some of America's greatest novels, giving voice to a "lost generation" shaken by war.
Eager to find his way in life and words, John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps. When the war was over, both men knew they had to write about it; they had to give voice to what they felt about war and life.
Their friendship and collaboration developed through the peace of the 1920s and 1930s, as Hemingway's novels soared to success while Dos Passos penned the greatest antiwar novel of his generation, Three Soldiers . In war, Hemingway found adventure, women, and a cause. Dos Passos saw only oppression and futility. Their different visions eventually turned their private friendship into a bitter public fight, fueled by money, jealousy, and lust.
Rich in evocative detail -- from Paris cafes to the Austrian Alps, from the streets of Pamplona to the waters of Key West -- The Ambulance Drivers is a biography of a turbulent friendship between two of the century's greatest writers, and an illustration of how war both inspires and destroys, unites and divides.
Author Notes
James McGrath Morris is the author of four previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press , which was awarded the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize, and the highly acclaimed Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power . He has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered , PBS's News Hour , and C-Span's Book TV . A former journalist, he was the founding editor of the monthly Biographer's Craft and has served as both the executive director and president of Biographers International Organization (BIO). Morris lives in Tesuque, New Mexico.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two of the most significant writers of their generation, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, are described by Morris (Pulitzer) in his evocative, lively volume about how differently they emerged from the crucible of WWI. Those differences, and their disparate personalities, affected how each wrote about that monumental event: Hemingway reveled in the adrenaline rush of danger and heroism, while Dos Passos came away sickened by the wanton destruction and the banality of the military machine. As Morris perceptively argues, "Unlike Hemingway, who sought to describe the desolate [post-WWI] world with honest clarity, Dos Passos wanted his writing to change it." The writers met briefly as ambulance drivers during the war and became friends in the vibrant expatriate community of postwar Paris. Morris's narrative demonstrates how, despite jealousies and differences, the two men found common ground, only to split over their opposing views of the Spanish Civil War. Both worked feverishly to find a voice for their "lost" generation and lead a literary revolution, albeit in divergent ways. Dos Passos will be the less recognizable name to most readers, and Morris does a great service by reinserting him into the picture of post-WWI American writers. Agent: Alan Nevins, Renaissance Literary & Talent. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The story of the close yet volatile friendship between John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.Biographies, volumes of letters, and memoirs have thoroughly, and repeatedly, revealed the quality of Hemingway's relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Sara and Gerald Murphy, among others: friendships that Hemingway viciously ended. "By 1936," writes biographer Morris (Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press, 2015, etc.), "Hemingway's list of lost friends was lengthy." Morris adds to that list novelist and journalist Dos Passos, whom Hemingway valued for many yearsuntil he did not. Morris' lively biography of their relationship offers a fresh view of Dos Passos, drawn from published and archival sources, but adds little to the portrait of Hemingway already well established: his love affair with a nurse who tended him during World War I, marriage to Hadley Richardson and early years in Paris, his early fame with The Sun Also Rises, his belligerent competitiveness, betrayals, life in Key West and Havana, and his suicide. The two men could not have been more different: Dos Passos, a friend recalled, was "so shy that he seems cold as an empty cellar with the door locked when you meet him." Hemingway was brash and gregarious; Dos Passos, irritatingly prickly, "hated small talk." Dos Passos, politically engaged, actively protested injustice and oppression; Hemingway ignored politics until the Spanish Civil War. They met briefly as ambulance drivers in 1917, but their friendship began later, when both were at the starts of their careers. Besides drinking and socializing, they became trusted readers of each other's work. Hemingway gratefully called Dos Passos his "most bitterly severe critic." Inevitably, though, their friendship devolved. Morris cites "a deep and fundamental difference" in their perception of war, but he portrays Hemingway as so mean, vengeful, and threatened by any other writer's success that their friendship could not have been anything but doomed. A welcome new look at Dos Passos and another sad chapter in the life of Hemingway. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
Morris provides a chronological, parallel-lives telling of the respective and intertwined personal histories and professional careers of John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Morris focuses on the two decades from their first meeting in Italy in 1918, when both were volunteer WW I ambulance drivers, to 1937, when their years of close friendship ended over conflicting political positions toward the Left during the Spanish Civil War. The author does a good job of identifying the differences in the two men's novel-writing styles and in the audiences they cultivated. Hemingway strove to make his characters and their lives and conflicts understandable to his readers, to make readers feel deeply. Dos Passos tended more toward the big picture of society, as projected in wars and profiteering businesses; he sought to help readers comprehend the structures of power and interest that caused suffering, destruction, and death during the Great War and subsequently in the Depression. One comes away from this book wanting to read or reread Dos Passos, who is historically important to the American novel though not central to the canon. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Stephen Miller, Texas A&M University