Today on the homepage, I begin a series on John Dos Passos — specifically, his 1956 collection The Theme Is Freedom. I wrote an essay on this subject for our current issue. And I’m expanding on that piece in my column.

I want to quote Neal Freeman to you — Neal being a luminous NR alumnus. But first, I must give you a slice of today’s installment, to set Neal up (not in the Marion Barry sense):

John Dos Passos was very, very famous. You knew Ralph Kiner and Adlai Stevenson, and you knew Dos Passos, too. His name is little known today — I can tell you that even the well-educated young don’t know it. But it was one of the biggest in American letters from the 1920s until about midcentury.
In fact, that’s the title of one of Dos Passos’s novels: “Midcentury.”
He was born in 1896. Sartre called him “the greatest writer of our time.” But something happened: Dos Passos broke with the Left, where everyone was, and moved right, for he was essentially a liberal, in the old sense. Hemingway told him that, if he persisted in his independence of thought, “the New York reviewers will kill you. They will demolish you forever.”
They did.
Critics decided that he could no longer write — which was baldly untrue. One beneficiary of his writing was a new magazine, NR (born in November 1955).

Okay, here is Neal, in a note to me:

Long before [Dos Passos] became a colleague, a mentor and a friend, I had watched The Crew go to work on his reputation. When I arrived at college in the late Fifties, Dos was still esteemed by the heavies at Yale — RWB Lewis, Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and such like. Dos was high on the leader board, just a notch or two behind Faulkner and Fitzgerald. By the time I left in the early Sixties, Dos had disappeared from the syllabus. The man couldn’t write a lick.

Yup. Exactly. Okay, here’s another slice of today’s installment, followed by something else from Neal:

For our pages, Dos Passos reported from the 1964 Republican convention. Four months later, he voted for the nominee, Goldwater.
Do you know how odd it was for Dos Passos, a onetime hero of the literary Left, worldwide, to pull the lever for Goldwater?

Before bringing Neal back in, I should mention that Dos Passos wrote in a unique style — dazzling but unconventional. (Maybe I should say dazzling and unconventional.) I now give you Neal, in a 2013 piece:

In 1964, NR sent a four-man team to cover the Republican convention in San Francisco. Bill Buckley, editor-in-chief of the magazine and de facto commander-in-chief of the Goldwater forces, a conflation of roles that would probably not be encouraged at the Columbia School of Journalism. Bill Rusher, publisher of the magazine and head of NR’s provisional wing. (William A. Rusher signed incendiary memos with his initials, giving them the appearance of having been issued by the War Department.) Me, the fuzzy-cheeked editor, by then schooled rigorously in the NR stylebook. And a freelance reporter who was to be our eyes and ears around the convention floor.
That first night, I presented Bill with the file for our daily edition. I watched as he worked his way through the stack of yellow copy paper, pleased that he was making only a few changes with that deadly red ballpoint. All of a sudden, he stood up, snatched a few sheets from the stack, marched across our tiny newsroom, and — holding the offending copy in his extended fingers, as if they were industrial tongs disposing of some particularly toxic substance — said, “Uhhh, Neal. Dos is allowed to roll his own.” I had converted into bland, standard-issue NR style a piece by our freelance reporter, John Dos Passos, one of the most celebrated prose stylists of the 20th century. I spent the next half-hour restoring syntactical eccentricities — and learning for a lifetime the elusive concept known as the exception to the rule.

The exception to the rule — almost my best friend.