Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Technology and the Suburban Nightmare in the Plays of John Dos Passos

Abstract

Dos Passos spent much of his childhood in hotel rooms. His mother, the mistress of a prominent attorney, traveled extensively throughout Europe and America with her son, and he grew accustomed to long journeys by steamship and rail. The sights and sounds of a crowded city block, hotel lobby, bustling wharf, and busy thoroughfare signaled home for Dos Passos. This type of landscape not only characterizes much of his fiction, but it also helps explain some of his interest in the theatre, which provides a literal space for recreating these dynamics. As a teenager at the Choate boarding school in Connecticut, he participated actively in drama, often playing the lead in school productions.2 These experiences inspired a lifelong passion for the theatre, and a few years later he decided to write plays “to attract, move and mould an audience” for social change.3