Statement on John Dos Passos. In “John Dos Passos: A Centennial Commemoration.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1996, edited by Samuel W. Bruce and L. Kay Webster, 173. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, Gale Research. In 44 words Mailer praises Dos Passos’s novel U.S.A. as the “most successful portrait of America in the first half of the twentieth century.”