The book features previously unpublished
manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of John Dos Passos' screen writing
for Paramount Pictures (1934); his role in writing and filming The Spanish Earth (1937), a Spanish
Civil War relief project whose circumstances culminated in his public break
from the Left; the 1936 screen treatment he wrote just before The Spanish Earth in consultation with
its director, Joris Ivens; and his later-career attempts, beginning in the
1940s, to adapt his radically innovative trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics
toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism after
the 1930s and the disillusionments of the Spanish Civil War. It thus provides a
new context for and reading of his political reorientation in the 1930s that
not only ended his long friendship with Ernest Hemingway but also evoked the
opprobrium of his former champions on the Left and redefined his literary
career.
