The Theme Is Freedom

This 1950s collection of travel and political pieces by John Dos Passos allowed him to look back on his youthful enthusiasms with a more seasoned eye. The challenge with a book whose author has moved across the political spectrum is, basically, to be honest. Dos Passos thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent in 1927; it would ill-serve his credibility as a member of the right to throw overboard his meticulous and heartfelt defense of them then, and he doesn't. Whether sympathetic to the early Communists, the IWW or, later, more free market thinking, the thread that links all of these ideas is found in the book's title, but more specifically in a defense of the individual against giant organizations.