Born in Chicago in 1896, John Dos Passos was raised outside of conventional, respectable nineteenth-century family arrangements as the illegitimate child of the attorney John R. Dos Passos and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison. He received an excellent education, attending Choate and Harvard. He is best known for his 1937 trilogy of novels, U.S.A., which begins with The 42nd Parallel, follows with 1919, and ends with The Big Money.