In June 1932, a discouraged month and year in the history of the United States, John Roderigo DOS Passos sat down in his Province- town, Massachusetts, house at the end of Commercial Street to write a new preface to his antiwar novel of 1921, Three Soldiers, published when he was 25.
Three Soldiers was being reissued by the Modern Library, a reprint series so inclusively "modern" in its taste that Petronius's Satyricon was in it along with Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and John Reed's...