Orient Express

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927. First Issue Illustrated with 8 tipped-in color plates from paintings by the Dos Passos. " John Dos Passos was born in Chicago in 1896, was educated both here and abroad, and graduated from Harvard in 1916. He then traveled to Spain, but soon joined the French Ambulance Service, later transferring to the U.S. Medical Corps. These experiences furnished the fuel for his early books and the resulting THREE SOLDIERS, published in 1921, was received with popular and critical acclaim. He followed it with MANHATTAN TRANSFER, which did in prose for New York what Carl Sandburg did in poetry for Chicago. Dos Passos then treated himself to a trip through Russia and the Levant. He kept a journal and published it in 1927 as ORIENT EXPRESS. In 1921-1922, Dos Passos took a 10,000-mile trip from New York across Europe to the Soviet republic of Georgia and then circled through the Middle East to North Africa and back to Europe through Spain. He traveled by boat, train, horse-drawn phaeton, camel caravan, and mail plane. The trip sharpened Dos Passos's sensitivity to the cultural differences between himself and the people he encountered. In January 1923, Dos Passos's friend and art teacher, Adelaide Lawson and sculptor Ruben Nakian, displayed fifty of his paintings in a major exhibit at the Whitney Studio Club, along with the works of other artists. That exhibit included paintings rendered to accompany Dos Passos's written account of the trip through the Middle East along with eight of his color illustrations,first published in 1927 as Orient Express. Usual markings. 1st Edition. Library Binding. Very Good/No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Ex-Library.