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The Ambulance Drivers: James McGrath Morris

In The Ambulance Drivers, James McGrath Morris relates the fractious friendship of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, two great novelists thrown together by war and driven apart in the decades-long aftermath of this encounter. 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 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; they had to give voice to what they felt about war and life. Their friendship and collaboration developed through the peace of the 1920s and 1930s, as Hemingway’s novels soared to success while Dos Passos penned the greatest antiwar novel of his generation, Three Soldiers. In war, Hemingway found adventure, women, and a cause. Dos Passos saw only oppression and futility. Their different visions eventually turned their private friendship into a bitter public fight, fueled by money, jealousy, and lust. “Never have Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos seemed so real or so important as in James McGrath Morris’s account of their passage through the Great War and the rise of fascism,” according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles. James McGrath Morris is the author of the New York Times bestseller Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press, which was awarded the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize, and Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power.











When: Mon., May. 15, 2017 at 7:00 pm
Where: McNally Jackson
52 Prince St.
212-274-1160
Price: Free
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In The Ambulance Drivers, James McGrath Morris relates the fractious friendship of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, two great novelists thrown together by war and driven apart in the decades-long aftermath of this encounter. 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 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; they had to give voice to what they felt about war and life. Their friendship and collaboration developed through the peace of the 1920s and 1930s, as Hemingway’s novels soared to success while Dos Passos penned the greatest antiwar novel of his generation, Three Soldiers. In war, Hemingway found adventure, women, and a cause. Dos Passos saw only oppression and futility. Their different visions eventually turned their private friendship into a bitter public fight, fueled by money, jealousy, and lust. “Never have Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos seemed so real or so important as in James McGrath Morris’s account of their passage through the Great War and the rise of fascism,” according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles. James McGrath Morris is the author of the New York Times bestseller Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press, which was awarded the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize, and Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power.

Buy tickets/get more info now