Episode 362: 'Midcentury' by John Dos Passos

Summary

Summary of "Episode 362: 'Midcentury' by John Dos Passos" from The Great Books Podcast

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Great Books
• Host/Author: National Review
• Episode: Episode 362: 'Midcentury' by John Dos Passos
• Release Date: March 4, 2025

---

Introduction

In Episode 362 of The Great Books podcast, hosted by John J. Miller of the National Review, the discussion centers around John Dos Passos's novel Mid Century. Joining Miller is Stephen Schreier, a professor at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and author of several scholarly works, including his latest, National Review's Literary Network. The conversation delves into the significance of Mid Century, its literary techniques, the political transformation of Dos Passos, and his connection to the National Review.

---

Why Mid Century by John Dos Passos is a Great Book

Stephen Schreier highlights the book's importance and relative neglect:

"[Mid Century] is an important and extremely neglected book by a great writer."
[00:57]

Schreier provides context, explaining Dos Passos's evolution from a leftist writer associated with the Lost Generation to a conservative thinker. Mid Century, published in 1961, represents Dos Passos's late-career work where he integrates his earlier literary techniques from the USA Trilogy with his newfound conservative ideology.

---

Literary Style and Techniques

Mid Century is characterized by its blend of fact and fiction, utilizing innovative literary forms:

"It combines fact and fiction in an interesting way... the entire book is drawn from transcripts from the Clennan hearings into union corruption."
[03:13] – Stephen Schreier

Dos Passos employs a collage-like technique, reminiscent of modernist writers like Hemingway and Joyce, to create a comprehensive portrayal of mid-20th century America. The novel begins with a free verse poem and includes documentary sections and biographies, segregating facts from fictional narratives.

---

Story and Characters

The novel does not follow a single narrative thread but instead weaves together the lives of multiple characters:

• Blackie Bowman: A World War II veteran and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), representing pre-war labor activism.

  "Blackie Bowman is a wobbly... a member of the Industrial Workers of the World."
  [07:20]

• Terry Bryant: A post-war worker who becomes a taxi driver, facing corruption and violence within the labor movement. His tragic end symbolizes the decline of union integrity.

  "He becomes a taxi driver... eventually bludgeoned to death and killed."
  [23:22]

The novel culminates in the "Great Taxicab War," a confrontation that underscores the central conflict between working-class individuals and corrupt organizational forces.

---

Themes: Labor Unions and Communism

Mid Century explores the corruption and bureaucratization of labor unions, intertwining with the rise of the Communist Party:

"Dos Passos sees organization as the enemy... responsible for the decline of the union movement."
[25:11] – Stephen Schreier

The novel critiques the transformation of unions from grassroots, democratic organizations into hierarchically structured entities compromised by Communist influence and mafia connections, exemplified by the character Jimmy Hoffa.

---

John Dos Passos's Political Transition

Dos Passos's journey from leftist affiliations to conservative thought is pivotal in understanding Mid Century:

"He was associated with a lot of communist causes... in 1937, he went to Spain to observe the Spanish Civil War... turned him against the Communist Party."
[10:31] – Stephen Schreier

Post-World War II, Dos Passos became involved with libertarian publications like The Freeman and later the National Review, aligning his literary endeavors with his conservative ideology. This shift is reflected in Mid Century, where he critiques both labor and corporate organizations.

---

Connection to National Review

Mid Century and Dos Passos's later works align with the intellectual currents of the National Review. Schreier notes the shared worldview with contributors like James Burnham:

"Dos Passos, I think, working with a similar kind of worldview... seeing a kind of managerial takeover of America."
[20:38] – Stephen Schreier

This connection underscores the magazine's role in shaping post-war conservative literary culture, providing a platform for writers transitioning from leftist to conservative stances.

---

Legacy and Relevance Today

Despite its initial impact, Mid Century has faded into relative obscurity. Schreier argues for its contemporary relevance:

"It really helps illuminate the USA Trilogy... understand American culture and American politics after World War II."
[31:18] – Stephen Schreier

The novel serves as a critical examination of mid-20th century American institutions, offering insights into the evolution of labor movements and organizational power, themes that resonate with ongoing discussions about union influence and corporate governance.

---

Conclusion

Mid Century by John Dos Passos stands as a significant yet overlooked work that bridges Dos Passos's early modernist experiments with his later conservative critiques of American institutions. Through its multifaceted narrative and innovative literary techniques, the novel provides a comprehensive portrayal of mid-century America, reflecting the author's political transformation and intellectual engagement with the issues of his time. Stephen Schreier's analysis on The Great Books podcast illuminates the enduring value of Dos Passos's work within the broader context of American literary and political history.

---

Notable Quotes:

• "Mid Century is... an important and extremely neglected book by a great writer." — Stephen Schreier [00:57]
• "It combines fact and fiction in an interesting way." — Stephen Schreier [03:13]
• "Dos Passos sees organization as the enemy." — Stephen Schreier [25:11]
• "It really helps illuminate the USA Trilogy." — Stephen Schreier [31:18]

Transcript

[Stephen Schreier]

Foreign.

[John J. Miller]

Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about Mid Century by John Dos Passos. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review and listening to a production of National Review. This episode is sponsored by the Herzog Foundation. I'll tell you more about that in just a few minutes. Our guest is Stephen Schreier, a professor at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. His books include Maximum Feasible Participation, American American Literature and the War on Poverty and Fantasies of the New Ideologies of Professionalism in post World War II American Fiction. His latest book, recently published by Oxford University Press, is National Reviews Literary Network. He joins us by zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. STEPHEN welcome to the Great Books Podcast.

[Stephen Schreier]

Thanks for having me.

[John J. Miller]

Why is Mid Century by John Dos Passos a great book?

[Stephen Schreier]

I would describe it as an important and extremely neglected book by a great writer. Just to give you a bit of context to where this book is coming from. Despassos, like a whole series of other writers like Ernest Hemingway, E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a member of the lost generation. He was a writer whose experiences were shaped by World War I, and he became very kind of early on in his career a writer of the political left. His most famous set of novels, for which he's most often remembered are his USA trilogy of the 1930s, in which he created a kind of vast panoramic picture of America from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1920s. Now, mid century is a late career book by him, and it's a book that he published after his turn to the political right. He published it in 1961, and he tried to recover a lot of the the literary techniques that he had first developed in USA and apply them now shaped by his new ideology of conservatism after his move to the right. So it's an important book because, I mean, first of all, it stands up really well in relation especially to other books by lost generation writers published in the 50s and 60s, books by Hemingway and others. And also it's a kind of fascinating view into the world of the political right in the 1950s and 1960s.

[John J. Miller]

We're going to talk about all that, what this book says, what story it tells, why it's important, its literary techniques. Also, we'll talk about the life and legacy of its author, his political transition, his connection to National Review, how he went from fame to forgotten, and more. STEPHEN let's start with the full title of this book. It's called Mid Century, but it Has a subtitle, A contemporary chronicle. And this title suggests a kind of progress report. Even nonfiction.

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah. And it combines fact and fiction in an interesting way. There are excerpts from advertisements from scientific journals. The entire book is drawn from transcripts from the Clennan hearings into union corruption. So there's a lot of fact that's woven into the book, but it's still a novel. It's a novel that kind of blends together elements of nonfiction and fiction into a new form. This is a kind of novel that Hemingway really invented in his attempt to provide a kind of total picture of America.

[John J. Miller]

The book starts with a free verse poem. Then there's a section called documentary. Then there's a bio of General Douglas MacArthur. It's a strange beginning for a novel.

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, it's his. He's trying to provide a total picture of America. In order to do that, he needs to draw on kind of all the resources that he can think of. There are parts of this novel that read like a conventional novel. There are parts of this novel that just tell the lives of different characters. And in order to kind of provide a historical context for those characters lives, he draws on fact and also tries to kind of multiply the different lenses that he uses to tell his story from as many different perspectives as possible.

[John J. Miller]

But it's not what you would call historical fiction. Right. The kind of story that brings real historical characters into a fictional narrative. This is something different. And it's got these. This. This approach where it's just just pure biography in certain points and. And documentary and then. And then novelistic storytelling.

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, it's like he segregates the fact from the fiction. So in kind of the classic historical novel, you would have a real historical figure as a kind of minor character in the lives of the fictional characters. Here. Those two sections are segregated. I think one of the reasons he does that is because it's hard to tell to write a novel that would involve someone like General MacArthur, because General MacArthur lives in a kind of a separate world from the characters that he's writing about. So instead, he kind of puts them in different worlds and invites the reader to draw connections. The reader has to do a fair bit of work in this book to situate the characters lives in relationship to the historical figures that are also in the book.

[John J. Miller]

Let's jump in, then, to the story. This is a novel. It has characters, it tells stories. But does it tell a story with one narrative through line from start to finish?

[Stephen Schreier]

Not really. I mean, there are. There are five different major characters in the text and then like maybe 50 minor characters. It's a fairly huge swath of characters. And the characters each have their own very separate story. And the novel kind of jumps between different characters in terms of an overarching plot. I mean, you think of plot in terms of conflict. And the major conflict of this book is the various characters, mostly working class characters, fighting against various different kinds of organizations that are shaping their lives. Unions, corporations, government, et cetera. The entire novel kind of builds towards a climactic confrontation between those two forces in a final section called the Great Taxicab War, in which a character is bludgeoned to death by union thugs. So the novel does culminate in a kind of central conflict, but the characters lives in the different sections kind of only intersect tangentially oftentimes from time to time.

[John J. Miller]

Let's discuss one of these characters, a guy called Blackie Bowman. He's a World War II veteran. Who is this guy? What does he do in the story of mid century?

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, he's my favorite character in the book. And I think this is where the book comes closest to recapturing a lot of the magic of the USA trilogy. So Blackie Bowman is a wobbly.

[John J. Miller]

Stephen, what's a wobbly? I know that's a slang term, but what is a wobbly?

[Stephen Schreier]

So a wobbly, it's a slang term for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. This was a union from the early 20th century, mostly an anarchist union. They differed from other unions in that they weren't divided by trade. Their goal was to create one big union that would encompass all workers. And they also differed from a lot of other unions in that they insisted on workplace democracy. That meant that first of all, there would be no real divisions between union leaders and the rank and file. And also they wanted workers elect their own managers. In the novel, the IWW functions as a kind of pure form of unionism that in Dos Passos account gets corrupted over the course of the 20th century. First of all, as the Communist Party becomes starts to become involved in the union movement in the 1920s and impose a kind of top down model of leadership. And then as unions become nationalized and increasingly organ. And the novel kind of through the story of Blackie Bowman, nostalgically looks back at the days of the iww.

[John J. Miller]

You mentioned communism. This is very much a Cold War novel, isn't it?

[Stephen Schreier]

It's very much a novel about kind of the emergence of the Communist Party and its proliferation in the 1930s and despassos. I mean Kind of, along with a lot of his fellow writers in National Review, often blurs the lines between and the welfare state, seeing the two as interpenetrable. Even in the 1950s, when the communist Party in the United States was shrunk down to a kind of a very small and fairly ineffective group. One of Dos Passos kind of critiques of the labor movement after World War II is that he sees it as being kind of continuous with the kind of strong arm tactics that the Communist Party was using in the 1930s.

[John J. Miller]

Now, you just mentioned National Review, and John Dos Passos had a connection to the magazine. Let's get into his biography briefly here. It's an interesting one. He was a very famous writer, as you mentioned, in the 1930s. He was on the COVID of Time magazine in 1936. And if you were to ask in the 1930s, a random American, who are the greatest living novelists today? You might hear Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner. You might also hear John Dos Passos. It's a name we don't really know today. But he had that kind of fame in the 30s when he was regarded as a leftist writer. What happened? How did he convert into something else? And how did he connect with National Review?

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, so he was already drifting. I mean, he was basically a fellow Traveler in the 1930s. He was never a member of the Communist Party, but he was associated with a lot of communist causes. In the early 1930s he was already starting to drift away from communism and seeing a lot of faults with the party, like around 1934, and embeds a kind of critique of the Communist Party in the last book of the USA trilogy. But especially in 1937, he went to Spain to observe the Spanish Civil War as a war correspondent. And his Spanish translator was shocked by the Communist Party. And that really turned him against the Communist Party. He wrote a novel in 1939 called Adventures of a Young man where for the first time he kind of head on criticized the Communist Party. And that precipitated his drift to the political right after World War II, in the early 1950s, he became involved with a magazine called the Freeman, a libertarian magazine, which was a kind of precursor in many ways to National Review. He kind of moved over from the Freeman to National Review and started writing mainly journalistic pieces for National Review. His career by the 1950s was pretty much dead as a writer. He was still writing books, still publishing them, but no one was. Increasingly, critics were turning against him. He was having a hard time getting some of his journalism published. And in Contrast to the 1930s, very few critics or people on the street would name Dos Passos as a great American writer. In the 1950s, he'd become very much forgotten.

[John J. Miller]

Was this purely a matter of politics objecting to his political conversion and thinking he's some strange conservative and no longer welcome in polite society? Or had the quality of his work actually declined?

[Stephen Schreier]

There's a bunch of different things going on. I mean, first of all, definitely when he published Adventures of a Young Man, Stalinist critics in the United States predictably turned against it. But there was a kind of a shift against communism amongst American literary intellectuals in general in the late 1930s. Dos Passos was a few years ahead of the game and having his God that failed moment. But not all that long before. Kind of anti Stalinist left wing critics like lionel trilling, Mary McCarthy, et cetera. Part of the problem that he also faced. I mean, first of all, the quality of his writing definitely changed, starting with Adventures of a Young Man. He abandoned for a time a lot of the kind of signature techniques that were associated with him after the USA Trilogy, writing more straightforward novels until he came to mid century. But there was also a kind of change in taste. Dos Passos was really at the forefront of an entire Generation of 1930s writers who sought to fuse together kind of modernist experimental techniques with social realism. Other writers that he influenced, James Farrell, Richard Wright, a whole series of others. And there was a kind of critical turn against that entire generation of writers because they were seen as too didactic. Like if you were to do canvas critics in the 1950s and ask them, what is the greatest writer of the 1930s? Probably most of them would say William Faulkner. William Faulkner was not a writer of the political left. He's kind of hard to pin down politically, but he definitely wasn't a writer of the political left. But he did kind of fit in with changing critical tastes which were affirming a kind of version of a more a version of modernism that was kind of closer to the kind of standards of the 1920s, to writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, etc. Dos Passos didn't really fit in with that because he was a political writer. Too political for say, the new Critics, who were kind of the dominant literary critics of the 1950s.

[John J. Miller]

When I was a student in college, I had to read the Big Money, which is one of the books in the USA trilogy, one of these 1930s books. It really helped make the reputation of John Dos Passos. I'd read that book and it really struck me what you call the experimental techniques of it. It was a strange book in a lot of ways. I was not used to it. It felt post in certain ways. I guess in the 1930s he must have felt avant garde. Is that true? Was this a gigantic innovation at the time about how to tell a story?

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, it was a new way of writing a novel. I mean, most of the techniques that he's using, I mean, they'd already been pioneered by writers like Joyce, Ezra Pound, who similarly used a kind of collage like technique in the Cantos. But definitely as a style. What was new with Dos Passos was that ambition to write a total novel of America using modernist techniques. That was new for the 1930s and that was what made his reputation as a writer and is the reason why USA became such a model text for 30s writers.

[John J. Miller]

One of the strengths of this form, it seems to me, is he really has an ability, through these techniques, to capture a moment, to get a sense of what America was like in the 1930s and it was mid century, what it was like in the 1950s. It's really topical in that sense. It seems to me maybe the flip side of that, the downside of that is it can also feel ephemeral. It can feel a little bit like journalism. Is that true?

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, and I think it's especially true for mid century because the entire novel revolves around a very topical issue around labor racketeering. I think there's a bit of a disjunction in mid century between. He's got kind of two different goals going on at the same time. On the one hand, he wants to write a total novel about America at mid century that's announced by the title and it's embedded in kind of the. The style of the novel, in the montage techniques that he's using. On the other hand, he also wants to write a topical novel about labour racketeering, and those two things would work together. If readers buy into the idea that labor racketeering can stand in for the whole. That that's an issue that captures all the dynamics of kind of America and mid century. But kind of in retrospect, it's a bit hard to see that that quite works in exactly the way that Dos Passos wants it to. I mean, if you look back at the 1950s and you think, what are the major conflicts of that era? You would probably say, well, the civil rights movement was a big deal, and the civil rights movement is completely absent from the book. So the novel is trying for. It's trying to reach for a kind of totality. But I Think Das Passos is struggling in mid century to grasp that totality in the same way that he could in, say, the big money.

[John J. Miller]

It's also maybe worth noting that the power of unions back then was a lot greater than it is now. I mean, union power remains, in certain ways considerable today, especially in public sector unions, with teacher unions and that sort of thing. But we are living in a different kind of world. And when you look back and read about his concerns about the concentration of power in labor unions, it does feel like yesterday's news.

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, definitely. I mean, especially, I mean, the 1950s. I mean, all the things that he says about, you know, like, you know, Jimmy Hoffa's connections to the Mafia, I mean, all that is documented fact. But one of the things about the 1950s, this was an era when, you know, income inequality was at historic lows in part because of the strength of unions. But definitely, yeah, this does seem like a bit of a time capsule because it gestures back to a time when unions were far more powerful than they are today.

[John J. Miller]

Jimmy Hoffa, who you mentioned, the labor leader, is the subject of one of the biographical sketches that John Dos Passos presents in this book. He does feel like a champion of the working man in this book. He wants to support working people and he's skeptical of union power. There's a line I rather like in this in one of the documentary sections where the line says, quote, did it ever occur to you that these union bosses do not speak for the working man, but for the union bosses? In other words, they're looking out for themselves. They're not looking out for the people they claim to represent.

[Stephen Schreier]

One of the things that Dos Passos is concerned about in general is that is a kind of a takeover by a kind of managerial elite that's taken over unions and that has also taken over corporations, that's taken over the government kind of. I mean, this is a concern that he shared with a lot of other National Review writers. At the same time, I think especially you see a lot of links between Dos Passos and James Burnham, who was an early kind of contributing editor for National Review and kind of helped shape the magazine's position on foreign policy.

[John J. Miller]

Also like John Dos Passos, a former leftist, in his case, a former Communist.

[Stephen Schreier]

Exactly. Yeah. So there was a kind of a series of writers working for National Review who adapted what was originally a kind of internal left wing critique of the Communist Party. James Bernin wrote the Managerial Revolution in the late 1930s, criticizing both the New Deal and Soviet totalitarianism and seeing a kind of a managerial takeover. In both of those cases at the time he was still writing no longer as as a kind of Stalinist, but as a Trotskyite. So you see Despasso, I think working with a similar kind of worldview in mid century, seeing a kind of managerial takeover of America that's influencing government, the unions and corporations.

[John J. Miller]

You're listening to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review, and this episode is sponsored by the Herzog Foundation. Education is one of the most important issues shaping our nation's future and the lion is here to keep keep you informed. Created by the Herzog Foundation, a leading national foundation dedicated to improving the quality of K12 education, the lion is your go to source for all things education as well as issues impacting families, parenting and culture. Whether you're a parent, grandparent, teacher or education enthusiast, the lion delivers in depth reporting, thoughtful analysis and inspiring stories. From school choice to classroom innovation, the lion keeps you informed on the the issues that matter most. Stay informed and inspired. Visit readlion.com that's R E A D L I o n read Lion.com and subscribe today. Would Jados Passos have said something like, you know, my politics haven't changed that much. I've always been a Jeffersonian, right? A kind of Jeffersonian, maybe small C conservative. We know he is fascinated by Thomas Jefferson. He wrote a book about him and and really loved that guy. But would he have said something like that? I've always been for the little guy.

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, he definitely did say that. And I think one of the things he's trying to do in mid century is draw links between his early and late politics. I mean, that's one of the reasons why the IWW features so prominently in the book and why Blackie Bowman is such a central character. He's trying to kind of reach back to the early 20th century and see links between the anarchism of the IWW and the kind of libertarianism that Dos Passos had embraced after World War II.

[John J. Miller]

Let's turn to the end of the book you mentioned earlier, this great taxi war confrontation and so on. This involves a character called Terry Bryant. Who is he? What happens to him throughout the course of the book and how does it end for him?

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, so he is kind of, I mean he forms like almost like a kind of post war parallel to Blackie Bowman. You know, Blackie is kind of Pre World War II worker who becomes involved in the union movement as a kind of anarchist activist and then kind of suffers all sorts of setbacks as he sees the unions being increasingly centralized and taken over by the Communist Party. Whereas Terry Bryant is a post World War II worker coming back after World War II, he becomes, and he has a series of kind of like disastrous confrontations with unions. First of all, he gets work in a rubber factory, helps organize it, but then discovers that his local union has been taken over by these corrupt officials who are trying to basically get as much money from it as possible. And then after he quits his job as a rubber worker, he's forced out of work as a rubber worker. He becomes a taxi driver working for an independent taxi company. But there, once again, he has a kind of run in this time, his taxi company, Swift Surface Cabs, gets involved in a kind of war with a conglomerate taxi company that's again run by the Mafia. And he's eventually bludgeoned to death and killed. So he becomes kind of like, you know, the counterpart, the historical counterpart to Blackie Bowman. Extending that history of unionism, as Dos Passos sees it, from the before World War II to after World War II.

[John J. Miller]

Is his vision of America in mid century ultimately bleak rather than optimistic, the way that story concludes? I think the answer might be yes. But what do you think?

[Stephen Schreier]

Absolutely. I mean, this is, I think, something that Das Passos was struggling with. He sees organization as the enemy. Organization is the downfall of America for him. Organization and bureaucratization. It is organizations responsible for the decline of the union movement. It's responsible for the kind of decline of small entrepreneurship. One of the central narratives in the novel focuses on a corporate executive who's trying to introduce new methods and new innovations into his company and is taken down by the kind of elite, the higher executives in his company. So organization is the enemy. But at the same time, Dos Passos struggles to imagine a world without organization, without centralization. I mean, one of the things that happens to that independent cab company is that the man who runs the company, who is a Korean War vet named Will Jeks, he is approached by this kind of shadowy figure named Judge Lewin, who owns stock in all of the novel's various companies. And he basically makes a proposition to Will that he will give Will control over Red Top Cabs, conglomerate them into one thing, with Judge Lewin owning stock in it and profiting from it. And Will Jenks has no kind of option but to accept this offer because he needs capital in order to continue running his company. So organization is inevitable. There's even one scene in one of those kind of prose poem sections where the kind of narrative voice was a Kind of stand in for Dos Passos himself reflects that human beings are colony creatures, kind of like ants. We can't help but create organizations.

[John J. Miller]

STEPHEN in the year 2010, National Review published a list of 10 great conservative novels. And this book was on it. Your book, your new book is called National Review's Literary Network. How'd you get interested in the subject of National Review and its literary culture?

[Stephen Schreier]

Basically, I mean, I started this project with a question I wanted to figure out. I wanted to know what conservatives were reading and what the conservative version of kind of the literary field looks like. I mean, writing. As an academic interested in Post World War II American Literature, I'm increasingly struck by the fact that critics tend to kind of treat the fact that most writers today are left wing as inevitable. So I wanted to challenge that and figure out what conservatives are reading, what a kind of conservative version of the literary field of literature actually looks like. So this brought me to National Review's Book Review section. When William buckley F. Buckley, Jr. Founded National Review in 1955, he wanted the magazine to be a kind of conservative alternative to left wing journals like Partisan Review. And so he wanted to have a robust literary section, book review section. Dos Passos was a kind of early literary figure whom he attracted to the magazine. But very quickly he attracted an entire range of talented writers. Hugh Kenner, Joan Didion, Gary Wills, Guy Davenport. So I started to look at the Book Review section and discover this kind of alternative universe of critics and writers who were associated with the magazine. And I became interested in what these writers, how these writers helped shaped conservativism after World War II. And also what drew them to National Review, and also what drove many of them away from National Review. A whole series of writers. Joan Didion, Garry Wills, eventually Guy Davenport, all eventually left the magazine and became kind of more associated with the political left. I wanted to figure out why that shift happened, what drew them to the magazine in the first place, and why.

[John J. Miller]

They went away, although some remained enduringly associated with the magazine. I'm thinking Whitaker, Chambers, Chambers, Russell Kirk and so on. So there are a lot of different kinds of experiences, right?

[Stephen Schreier]

Yes, exactly. I mean, one of the big discoveries for me was D. Keith Mano, who is a writer who just. He's completely fallen off the critical radar. He was a writer who mainly wrote for national review in the 1970s, writing a kind of satirical column called the Gimlet Ock. And he wrote a stunning novel called Take Five, which was a kind of like. I mean, I think this, this would count as Another kind of great book associated with National Review, and it's kind.

[John J. Miller]

Of hard to describe what it's about, right?

[Stephen Schreier]

Yeah, it's like a weird mix of like a postmodern novel and a Christian novel. He described himself as a Christian pornographer, a writer who would use sex to read Leaders to God. And Take Five is definitely kind of in that vein. It's a bawdy, risque, ginormous novel about this filmmaker whose senses are stripped from him one by one until finally he's left alone with God. So, yeah, definitely there were some writers who stayed with the magazine throughout the 1970s into the 1980s.

[John J. Miller]

Let's wrap up with one more question about John Dos Passos in Mid Century, maybe a two part question, which is, how did you discover John Dos Passos? Did you have to read him before you embarked on this project? Were you familiar with his work? And renewed your familiarity with this project to discover him through this project? And finally, what's the case for reading Mid Century now in a different century? In the 2000s?

[Stephen Schreier]

I mean, I discovered Dos Passos as a grad student. He was part of my comprehensive exam list. I read the entirety of the USA Trilogy and loved it as a grad student. And that was, I mean, that's really the only text that's ever assigned by Dos Passos and is really only typically assigned mostly at the graduate level. Occasionally you might find one book like the Big Money assigned in an undergraduate course. I heard of his political shift towards the right, but didn't really know much about it when I started researching this project. I wasn't surprised to find El Paso writing for National Review, but was excited to find Mid Century as a kind of literary product of the national view. Right. I think the main case for reading it now as a text is first of all, it really helps illuminate the USA Trilogy. It functions as a kind of sequel to the USA Trilogy and underscores, I think, the deep pessimist that always ran through Dos Passos work. And it also highlights the way that his kind of Jeffersonian politics could shift so easily from the left to the right. So it's a novel that really helps us understand kind of American culture and American politics after World War II.

[John J. Miller]

Stephen Schreier, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about Mid Century by John Dos Passos.

[Stephen Schreier]

Thank you very much.

[John J. Miller]

You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Please send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through my [e-mail] on Twitter. My handle is Eymiller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Great Books Podcast.