The cover of this book features one of what seem to be only two photographs that exist of Dos Passos with a motion picture camera. The other appears in Figure 12. Both were taken on the same occasion, during the filming of The Spanish Earth. The cover image depicts the writer in the center, his right shoulder contiguous to the machine. The Dutch director Joris Ivens kneels in front of the camera; to the left of the camera stands John Fernhout, the Dutch photographer who worked with Ivens on the documentaries he made in the 1930s and 1940s. The boy to Dos Passos's left is probably the child who played the part of the brother of Republican soldier Julián in scenes Ivens staged for The Spanish Earth of the soldier's homecoming from combat to his village of Fuentedueña de Tajo. The setting of the picture is almost certainly Fuentedueña, concurs filmmaker Peter Davis, who visited the location during the filming of his 2017 documentary Digging The Spanish Earth, which explores the political and artistic controversies that contextualized Ivens’s film. The poplars in the background are certainly reminiscent of Fuentedueña as it appears in The Spanish Earth, though they are common in Spain (Figure 13).

It is an irony that these sole pictures of Dos Passos with a movie camera were taken during location shooting for the one of his experiences with film that he was least involved in, and the reasons for that detachment had profound effects on the direction of his politics, his subsequent writing, his literary legacy, and his life. Paradoxically, it is likely the only motion picture project readers associate him with, if they know anything at all about the intersection of his life and his work, and that oversimplified identification of him with Ivens's propagandistic documentary project and its impact on his politics obscures more complicated truths about his career and his persona as a writer. This oversimplification also helps explain why Dos Passos is not canonized or popularized, even as his contemporary literary friends such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway have become the subjects of still-proliferating studies, articles, and popular books and films.