John Dos Passos did not set out to be a novelist by profession. Even though he had published essays, stories, and poems as early as his Harvard years, beginning in 1912, and was already at work on a novel during college, he had also sketched regularly, skillfully capturing and cataloguing iconic architecture and classical works of art in notebooks he kept as a youth during his extended travels and periods living in European cities with his mother. In fact, he recalled in his 1966 memoir, The Best Times, that as late as 1922 he still did not know “whether [he] wanted most to paint or write” as a vocation. Even as he published two novels, One Man's Initiation—1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), in rapid succession after graduating from college, then experiencing a more elemental education as an ambulance driver on the French and Italian fronts during World War I, he painted and recorded in pastels scenes, people, and the native buildings of France, Spain, and Italy while serving in the ambulance corps. With his sensitivity to the visual and his firsthand exposure to the ways organizations and forces in industrialized societies—the military, governments, corporations, technologies and systems of mass production, communications media—could co-opt individual self-determination and brutalize the human spirit, it was not surprising that he gravitated toward artistic methods that could combine non-verbal aesthetics with political texts and subtexts to create a form capable of moving audiences beyond passive reading or viewing to actively engaging with art and thereby reaching their own revelations about how the massive transformations of the post-war world were shaping their lives.

Describing this nexus in his early career, he spoke of the impulse he felt after the war, in the 1920s, to create art that would “stand up off the page.” Influenced by the expanded expressive capabilities created in the ferment of modernism by new interactions among artistic methods such as Cubism and montage, he challenged himself to “record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded.” Short of actually creating a motion picture, he sought a means to use its qualities of “simultaneity,” “contrast, juxtaposition, montage” to “build drama into [a] narrative.”