With the book release just a week away, press coverage is revving up for The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War by talented biographer James McGrath Morris. The New York Post has a piece on it today.

I think I’ve seen John Dos Passos mentioned as an influence on author Kim Stanley Robinson before. Here is a reference in a Sacramento magazine. I’ll have to discover Robinson’s work!

Congratulations to Danzy Senna, novelist and short story author, winner of the 2017 Longwood University Dos Passos Prize! I’m excited to discover her work.

The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos: A Collection and Study is a new book on his visual art. I love so many of those works. To me, they’re reflections of the glow inside him.

John Dos Passos, along with Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Auslander, Ring Lardner Jr, and Dashiell Hammett, contributed to the debut issue of Esquire magazine in 1933.

Happy Birthday, grandfather! This is a fine occasion to spread word about James McGrath Morris” forthcoming book on the Dos Passos-Hemingway friendship. The adventure arrives March 28, 2017!

The John Dos Passos Society invites proposals for two sessions scheduled at the American Literature Association’s 28th annual conference, which will meet at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on May 25-28, 2017 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend).

I was reading today and came across one of the punchiest ever quotes from Dos Passos. It’s found in The Fourteenth Chronicle, his poorly known but pristine collection of letters.

The Economist reports on a new exhibition, “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

More press (in Portuguese) on the new TAP airplane named after John Dos Passos. More photos to come!

Great news to share! TAP, Portugal’s “national flag carrier,” established in 1945, designates all aircraft in its fleet after prestigious Portuguese personalities, such as writers, historians, and navigators.

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga–where the John Dos Passos Society was founded–published a brief recap of the successful Madrid conference earlier this summer.

The story of Captain Humayun Khan is all over the news now, as Donald Trump desecrates his name and challenges Americans to find the lowest moral ground in existence.

Congratulations to David Murad, the new president of the John Dos Passos Society. I’m confident in his leadership of this special group.

I’ve been re-reading Manhattan Transfer and enjoying it. I don’t recall when I first read it but there is no question that this current reading is more profitable.

I’ve been reading Century’s Ebb lately and I had the chance to read a remarkable piece, “Christmas on the Moon.” The idealism there about the Apollo program reminds me of the film Apollo 13 and its beautiful score by James Horner.

A lovely video from a series of interviews with John Dos Passos in 1969 for French TV. This one is on a motorboat and he is fishing while talking about the Dada movement in French. Talk about multitasking! And the interviews ends when he catches a fish!

The conference was a tremendous success. It will take much time to reflect on it and take stock of all the emotional and intellectual lessons.

French photographer Jean-Pierre Charbonnel is preparing an exhibition of forty photographs which will be called “travel literature.” One of the photographs will be accompanied by a short excerpt from Manhattan Transfer!

Like many, I regard the U.S.A trilogy as Dos Passos’ finest work. Manhattan Transfer, however, is a close second. It has proven an enduring title in the United States, Japan, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere.