Grand Design

District of Columbia #3

by John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos's literary response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, The Grand Design critiques the gargantuan growth of bureaucracy in Washington during the Great Depression and World War II. The satiric novel conveys the author's frustration with federal overreach and the hollow rhetoric that sells it to the people."War is a time of Caesars," writes Dos Passos as he laments the death of idealistic, intelligent enterprises at the desks of elitist administrators. After witnessing the Spanish Civil War claim so many well-intentioned men, he advises caution for America's New "Some things we have learned, but not enough; there is more to learn. Today we must learn to found again in freedom our republic."

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

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

[Michael David · Rating 1 out of 5]

John Dos Passos was a popular American writer during the first half of the twentieth-century for his innovative vérité literature. He featured aspects of American life and society. After reading this book I have realized the reason why he's no longer as well-regarded as his contemporaries such as Faulkner and Hemingway. Faulkner inhabited and manifested the South that he both loved and loathed. Dos Passos, on the other hand, wrote about disadvahntages as if it actually changed how the word was pronounced. In addition, he laced his writing with a lot of foreign words in order to realize the vérité he wished to portray, but to the modern reader (and to me, especially), there's just a lot of noise without much substance. This novel was supposed to be a critique of FDR's New Deal, but is just a long, meandering, unfocused work.

Give me Frank Yerby any day.