The Musical Bard
A turn through the musical museum of folk song and family The post The Musical Bard appeared first on The American Scholar. John Dos Passos was the author of the U.S.A. trilogy, Manhattan Transfer, and Three Soldiers, among many other books, for which, in 1957, he was awarded the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also my grandfather. I never met him—he died 13 years before I was born—but I have been able to get a sense of his formidable spirit from old family photographs. In one of my favorites, taken when he was in his 60s, he is in a boat on the Potomac River near Dos Passos Farm in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The river is wide there, near where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, and my grandfather is holding up a pufferfish, inflated in full glory before the camera. His smile swings for the fences and reminds me of something he wrote in a 1918 letter to a friend: “While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket.” In the beloved mythology of America’s Lost Generation writers, the pastime of
