"People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them." -John Dos Passos
Dos Passos was one of the Lost Generation modernist writers, alongside men like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (with whom Dos Passos was close). Like the rest of their generation, these writers were typified by a sense of alienation and exile, most of them having served in (or been affected by) the horrors of World War I. "New situations arise faster than the ethical norms... Reflexes become confused and people lose their power to choose between good and evil," wrote Dos Passos in The Prospect Before Us. "Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race."
