Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War

Harvard Book Store welcomes bestselling biographer JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS—author of the National Book Prize–winning Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne and The First Lady of the Black Press —for a discussion of his latest book, The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War.

John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps. When the war was over, both men knew they had to write about it- resulting in some of America’s greatest novels, an intense twenty-year friendship, and voices for a “lost generation” shaken by war.