In All Countries

by John Dos Passos

Essays on Mexico, Russia, The United States, and Spain.

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1934

About the author

John Dos Passos was a prominent American novelist, artist, and political thinker best known for his U.S.A. trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—a groundbreaking work of modernist fiction that employed experimental narrative techniques to depict the complexities of early 20th-century American life. Born in Chicago in 1896, he was educated at Harvard and served as an ambulance driver during World War I, experiences that deeply influenced his early literary themes. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, and the antiwar Three Soldiers drew on his wartime observations and marked him as a major voice among the Lost Generation.
Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer brought him widespread recognition and introduced stylistic innovations that would define his later work. His U.S.A. trilogy fused fiction, biography, newsreel-style reportage, and autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections to explore the impact of capitalism, war, and political disillusionment on the American psyche. Once aligned with leftist politics, Dos Passos grew increasingly disillusioned with Communism, especially after the murder of his friend José Robles during the Spanish Civil War—a turning point that led to a break with Ernest Hemingway and a sharp turn toward conservatism.
Throughout his career, Dos Passos remained politically engaged, writing essays, journalism, and historical studies while also campaigning for right-leaning figures like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s. He contributed to publications such as American Heritage, National Review, and The Freeman, and published over forty books including biographies and historical reflections. Despite political shifts, his commitment to liberty and skepticism of authoritarianism remained central themes.
Also a visual artist, Dos Passos created cover art and illustrations for many of his own books, exhibiting a style influenced by modernist European art. Though less acclaimed for his painting, he remained artistically active throughout his life. His multidisciplinary approach and innovations in narrative structure influenced numerous writers and filmmakers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer and Adam Curtis.
Later recognized with the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for literature in 1967, Dos Passos’s legacy endures through his literary innovations and sharp commentary on American identity. He died in 1970, leaving behind a vast and diverse body of work that continues to shape the landscape of American fiction.

Reviews

[William Childers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 1934 book is “travel writing” only in a very specific sense. Dos Passos here visits “hot spots” around the globe where significant political changes are taking place: the Soviet Union, Mexico, Spain, various places in the U.S. He listens to what people are saying, and writes it up in lively modernist prose. The resulting reportage paved the way for what later came to be known as the “new journalism” practiced by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, etc.

Dos Passos is here carving out a role for himself as a public intellectual, no longer in the model of the “man of letters,” prevalent from the Enlightenment through the Victorian Era. This public intellectual is a bit of an adventurer, a man of action, though his primary action consists of listening and recording his impressions. Dos Passos self-consciously and deliberately defines his stance as a writer. Not a neutral observer, but not an active participant either. While he displays a clear sympathy with those fighting against inequality and injustice, taking the side of poor farmers and workers "in all countries," he nonetheless avoids committing to any definite political program or ideological position.

This ambiguity is displayed in the introductory text titled “Passport Photo,” which serves as a prologue. Dos Passos presents himself about to depart from the Soviet Union. The factory workers he has met, through their interpreter, ask a question: “'They like you very much, but […] they want to know where you stand politically. Are you with us?' […] Too many hands shaken, too many foreign languages badly understood….‘But let me see…But maybe I can explain…But in so short a time…there’s no time.’ The train is moving. I have to run and jump for it. They are gone in a whirl of steam, rubbed out by the irongrey darkness.” He never answers the question.

Later in the book, when he witnesses the bloody Harlan County miners’ strike, a young miner who walks with him on the road after a National Mineworkers’ Union meeting asks him: “'Are you in this business too?’ I said I was a writer, writers were people who stayed on the sidelines as long as they could. They were sympathizers. He looked disappointed. ‘I thought maybe you was a lodgemember, in for a revolution too…because I’m in it…up to the neck.’”

Some of the best pages, in my opinion anyway, are: the brief biography of Emiliano Zapata; the account of the massacre of Spanish anarchists at Casas Viejas; Dos Passos’ interviews in prison with Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; and, extraordinary in its relevance to the recent events of Jan 6th, 2021, the description here of the disgruntled “Bonus Army” – WW I veterans suffering deprivation in the Great Depression, who demanded their bonuses be moved up. They marched on the Capitol Building when the measure was about to be voted on in Congress, and in the violent confrontations that ensued, two of the veterans were killed by police. Plus ça change…

The trailblazing, engaged journalism of these so-called “travel writings” is a crucial part of the context for understanding Dos Passos’ acknowledged masterpiece, the “U.S.A.” triology, which was written around the same time. The first volume of that trilogy, “The 42nd Parallel,” currently has 433 reviews here, while “In All Countries” has, now, one.