John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme

John Dos Passos’s three accounts of his November 1931 journey to Kentucky’s Harlan County to observe labor conditions in the coal industry exhibit a major socially committed 1930s writer trying out various modernistic forms in order to communicate the meaning of a significant social event. His three efforts—Harlan Miners Speak (1932), “Harlan: Working under the Gun” (December 1931), and “the Camera Eye (51)” in The Big Money (1936)—reveal his discomfort with the shapelessness and ideological bias of the documentary and his greater achievements in the forms of reportage and stream of consciousness. Reportage permitted him to mold the account of his visit into a sophisticated artwork, stream of consciousness to probe his deepest personal response to the event.