Restaging the Disaster: Dos Passos and National Literatures after the Spanish-American War

This essay explores a surprising route through which American modernism was reformulated internationally by a key writer of the young New York left, John Dos Passos, in the teens and twenties. It argues that Dos Passos's trips to Spain and the many publications that resulted from them provided the model for his ideal of an anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist literature of a diverse federation of autonomous communities. Against the vision of his father, who joined American imperialists in celebrating the Spanish-American War of 1898, Dos Passos sees Spain's imperial decline and national disintegration as a boon for its flourishing literature, and America's victory as another harmful blow to its culture. That is, he restages the war and inverts its impact through literary commentaries and translations. This inversion then informs several of his own works, too, including A Pushcart to the Curb (1922) and Manhattan Transfer (1925).