By unlikely accident, when I was a graduate student in the mid- 1980s I found myself touring the Prado, the Spanish national art museum in Madrid, in the company of Alfred Kazin, the iconic American writer and literary critic. A group of U.S. and European scholars and other graduate students had converged in Madrid to travel north by train together to Salamanca, where we were all to participate in an American Studies conference at the ancient university there. Kazin, of course, was to be the keynote speaker; his canonical works On Native Grounds (1942) and An American Procession (1984) had been fundamental texts in the early development of the American Studies discipline. He had written also, and more personally, about his life and work as one of the leading intellectual figures of the American Left in the mid-twentieth century, his career intersecting with Dos Passos's while that writer's political shift was still a current debate among their fellow critics. As a committed liberal Kazin had been disappointed by what he considered an abandonment of proletarian causes by too many of the radical vanguard, including Dos Passos, whose activism had been tempered by the Second World War, its Spanish harbinger, and the subsequent Cold War. Of Dos Passos Kazin wrote, around the time of the conference in Spain, that even after the writer's “disillusionment with the Left,” the “‘Jeffersonian’ tracts” Dos Passos subsequently produced, though “politically simple-minded, were invigorated by the physical images that dizzyingly moved his style.”

At the time of that conference I was in the middle of the doctoral program in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, beginning to focus on twentieth-century American literature as my major field, and I had recently been introduced to the work of Dos Passos in a seminar on politics and the novel by the professor, Townsend Ludington, who in 1980 had published the first comprehensive biography of the writer, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey. Like some of the others in the seminar and like most students today, it was my first reading of Dos Passos's work, and I was fascinated by the cinematic style of U.S.A., which seemed even in the 1980s so completely to reflect wide-screen American life.