Even as Dos Passos and Ivens were exchanging letters between June and October 1936 about how to use film to unfold the truth about the film industry, the second project in which they would work together, The Spanish Earth, was beginning to take shape in its earliest form. Within a year of the film's initiation, by the middle of 1937, Dos Passos's beliefs about the relationship between politics and art would be challenged and reshaped by his immersion in the divisive, dangerous circumstances surrounding the Ivens-directed documentary. The extent to which Dos Passos and Ivens genuinely collaborated on screen work together in 1936–37 is clarified by the collaborative letters and manuscript evidence generated by the process of creating “Dreamfactory” and by the many recent publications featuring research into all aspects of the making of The Spanish Earth.1 Taken together, the evidence shows that the two artists exchanged ideas about the Hollywood story although, as the letters and resultant drafts that exist suggest, even in that project their goals and methods showed signs of divergence. Indeed, the same areas of divergence opened almost at the outset of work on The Spanish Earth not only between Dos Passos and Ivens but also between Dos Passos and Hemingway: What were the ideological ends of the work? What aesthetic means to achieve those ends were the most organically appropriate, potentially effective, yet artistically ethical? Ultimately, there is no manuscript evidence that Dos Passos contributed to the writing of The Spanish Earth. Yet it is a work whose making and circumstances shaped his subsequent career and literary reputation.

When Dos Passos arrived in Spain in the first week in April 1937 to advise and assist in the filming of the war documentary, he was almost immediately confronted with a more personal, but, to him, equally compelling set of issues: his friend of twenty years and the translator of his works into Spanish, the U.S. expatriate but committed Spanish patriot José Robles, had vanished. Dos Passos had detoured on his way to Madrid, where he was to meet the film crew and other journalists, to find Robles in Valencia, where he had been staying with his family while on leave from his professorship in languages at Johns Hopkins University and where he had been serving the Republican forces as Spanish translator for the Russian military administrators in the cause.