Mount Vernon Literary Tour: John Dos Passos

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at George Peabody Library, 17 East Mount Vernon Place Transcript: Novelist John Dos Passos (b. 1896, d. 1970) lived in Baltimore from 1952 until his death. He could often be found here, in the Peabody Library reading room, researching and writing in an upper floor alcove. He picked a good spot: the library, which is open to the public, is widely considered the city’s most spectacular interior space. Little remembered today, Dos Passos was once recognized as a quintessential Jazz Age writer, on a par with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His sweeping three-volume novel U.S.A., published in the 1930s, captured America’s dynamic society with its groundbreaking mix of fiction, biography, newspaper clippings, songs, and more. His innovative techniques influenced generations of authors. Jean-Paul Sartre called him “the greatest writer of our time.” Dos Passos greatly appreciated his adopted city, its color, tempo, and variety. Baltimore was, he wrote, a city that “imbues the inhabitants with a certain dignity.”