Travel Books and Other Writings, 1916-1941

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.