Travel Books and Other Writings, 1916-1941

by John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos witnessed the modern era's defining events and distilled their literary essence into an innovative, trademark pastiche style: "something like a multimedia event" in book form, wrote "The New Yorker." As an ambulance driver during World War I, as an eyewitness to the Spanish Civil War, Italian Fascism, Mexican social upheaval, and post-revolutionary shifts in Russia and Central Asia, and as a participant in protests in the United States, Dos Passos charted cataclysms and his evolving response to them before the ink had dried in the history books. Now The Library of America restores to print his vibrant travel books-"Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), Orient Express (1927), In All Countries (1934)," and the Spanish Civil War material added to "Journeys Between Wars" (1938)-American classics Dos Passos wrote concurrently with his fictional masterpieces "Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer" (see opposite page), and U.S.A. Featured in this edition are full-color reproductions of Dos Passos' own remarkably vivid "Orient Express" watercolors.
This volume also restores to print the rare travel poems cycle "A Pushcart at the Curb" (1922); political and literary essays that dramatize his complicated relationship with communism; and a selection of early letters and diaries from World War I.

Genres: Travel, History, Poetry, Essays, Literature, Nonfiction

865 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

John Dos Passos was a prominent American novelist, artist, and political thinker best known for his U.S.A. trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—a groundbreaking work of modernist fiction that employed experimental narrative techniques to depict the complexities of early 20th-century American life. Born in Chicago in 1896, he was educated at Harvard and served as an ambulance driver during World War I, experiences that deeply influenced his early literary themes. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, and the antiwar Three Soldiers drew on his wartime observations and marked him as a major voice among the Lost Generation.
Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer brought him widespread recognition and introduced stylistic innovations that would define his later work. His U.S.A. trilogy fused fiction, biography, newsreel-style reportage, and autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections to explore the impact of capitalism, war, and political disillusionment on the American psyche. Once aligned with leftist politics, Dos Passos grew increasingly disillusioned with Communism, especially after the murder of his friend José Robles during the Spanish Civil War—a turning point that led to a break with Ernest Hemingway and a sharp turn toward conservatism.
Throughout his career, Dos Passos remained politically engaged, writing essays, journalism, and historical studies while also campaigning for right-leaning figures like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s. He contributed to publications such as American Heritage, National Review, and The Freeman, and published over forty books including biographies and historical reflections. Despite political shifts, his commitment to liberty and skepticism of authoritarianism remained central themes.
Also a visual artist, Dos Passos created cover art and illustrations for many of his own books, exhibiting a style influenced by modernist European art. Though less acclaimed for his painting, he remained artistically active throughout his life. His multidisciplinary approach and innovations in narrative structure influenced numerous writers and filmmakers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer and Adam Curtis.
Later recognized with the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for literature in 1967, Dos Passos’s legacy endures through his literary innovations and sharp commentary on American identity. He died in 1970, leaving behind a vast and diverse body of work that continues to shape the landscape of American fiction.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Luscious prose, vivid descriptions, fascinating characters and thought-provoking circumstances. All this and it's true.

I have read Dos Passos's America Trilogy but was unacquainted with any of his other works. I came to them through the book Hotel Florida, concerning journalists covering the Spanish Civil War. The picture of Dos Passos that Hemingway paints is very negative - and I must mention that I do not like Hemingway as a writer nor, the more I learn about him, is he a man I would like to sit down with and have a drink. But that image of Dos Passos irritated me. Besides, a good friend of DP had gone missing in Spain and he was trying to locate him. His short description of what he was trying to do is included in this volume.

Therefore, because I wanted to read his selections on the Spanish Civil War (and refute E.H.), I picked this up. I only intended to read the Spanish Civil War parts. I got hooked on the prose, etc., and read the whole thing.

If you've read any of Dos Passos or if you're interested in travel writing from the first part of the 20th Century (including Spain, France, Russia after the revolution, Mexico), pick it up. You won't regret it!

[Paul B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was one of those American intellectuals who started the 20th century as a Communist and ended up as a Goldwater Republican. The writings collected in this volume provide some insight into that transition. For me, that would be reason enough to read it, especially given the verve that Dos Passos imparts to his observational writing. I'm less taken by the poetry that you'll also find here, but it fits. Dos Passos does a lot of describing the mood and scene in poems written before his 4oth birthday. And he had seen a lot. He volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, and returned to bear witness to many the many changes in Europe that culminated in World War II. If you bear this back story in mind, you will be fascinated by the transition in his observations and writing style. I would recommend beginning your read with the selection of his letters at the back of the book. We start with him about to ship off for service in the ambulance corps and watch his hopes for socialist revolution grow in response to his first-hand experience of war. The letters are full of youthful enthusiasm (including that special cynicism that only the young can muster), and they tell the back story behind other writings included in the text.

The first volume of travel writings included here, Rosinante To The Road Again is a lightly fictionalized account of wanderings through Spain shortly after the first war ended. It conveys the appreciation that Dos Passos developed for the rural countryside. That would get stated explicitly in one of the excerpts from Journeys Between Wars, written after a visit early in the Spanish Civil War. In All Countries also consists of vignettes from his experiences with violence and oppression in various places—Mexico, Russia, the United States—between the wars. Here we get his first inklings that Soviet communism may not be the model of progress he had hoped it would be.

The other travel book in this volume is Orient Express. It's an adventure through the Middle East that reminded me of the trip recounted in The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It, taken a half-century earlier. This collection is rounded out with essays written between 1916 and 1941, and published in places like The New Republic and The Nation. Here we see Dos Passos transitioning from thinking there is nothing good or original in America to seeing America as the refuge and best hope for European culture.

Perhaps I should add that I've never succeeded as a reader of Dos Passos' more celebrated fiction. Maybe I should give Manhattan Transfer another try, but my point would be that readers who come to this book from his fiction might be disappointed, while readers who want some insight into that fascinating period between the 20th century's two great wars will be amply rewarded.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Library of America edition collects the early travel writings of American novelist John Dos Passos, plus some early letters and journal entries (1916-1920) and some uncollected essays. The travel essays and some of the political essays are the real pleasure here, while a volume of poems (A Pushcart at the Curb) is the weakest section of this 800 page anthology. Dos Passos was a thoughtful observer and an intrepid traveler—it’s worth the reading just to see parts of the world (rural Spain, Mesopotamia, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, etc) before tourism was everywhere and when travel was done by boat, train, wagon and foot, rarely by car or plane, though there are a couple of essays where early cars or planes factor into a journey.

He does go to more travelled places as well, France and Washington, D.C., for example and writes interestingly about them but the best writing is about places that present the reader a view of time and place that is far removed from the modern world. The essays on Spain (Rosinante to the Road Again) describe an old-fashioned walking tour, not of a city or town, but of a region, where Dos Passos and a companion walk dirt roads through countryside, over hills and across rivers over several weeks. Another collection (Orient Express) includes a long description of a ride through the desert by camel—today we think if we shut our blackberries off for a weekend we are out of touch with the world; Dos Passos was weeks in the desert without a way of sending or receiving letters or of communicating with anyone but his companions in the caravan. It’s all very interesting and beautifully written. The highlights for me were the essays on Spain in the teens and twenties before the Spanish Civil War and the essays in the collection In All Countries and from Journey Between Wars, which include writings on the Spanish Civil War.

The journals/diaries are also interesting but come oddly at the end of the anthology though they cover a time period at the front of the book’s chronological range, beginning with Dos Passos as a teenaged college student, some of his early travels, and his experiences in World War One. It is a book for fans of the writer, which I am, or for connoisseurs of good travel writing.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I admire much of Dos Passos's early fiction, I was greatly disappointed in this compilation. There are some very good essays here, particularly his travel essays from Spain during the Civil War. Of the travel books included here, the first two show the marks of a writer who is still uncertain of his craft. _Rosinante to the Road Again_ is a bit naive and flowery, while _Orient Express_ begins well (what if a stylistically innovative modernist set out to write a travel book? Very interesting stuff might happen...) but comes to a slog of an ending. The best work here is _In all Countries_, and that is mainly because of his political writings on the US rather than on the travel portions of the work. Dos Passos was no poet (and he had the good sense to know this; his book of youthful poems was not republished during his lifetime): _Pushcart at the Curb_ can be safely avoided. I am further somewhat puzzled and disappointed by Townsend Ludington's inclusion of selected letters and diaries from 1916 through 1920. Aside from brief glimpses of Dos Passos's experience that throw some light on the portions of his fiction dealing with World War I, the inclusion of these minor scribblings seems a little arbitrary. On the whole, a very uneven collection, both because of Dos Passos's writing and Ludington's editing.

[Ned]

Really like "The Orient Express" and at such a young age. His Diaries are remarkable for such a young person as well.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars because it’s spotty. Some pieces are better than others. I thought the general essays were the most consistently good