Dos Passos befriends and champions the work of modernist French poet Blaise Cendrars and agrees to translate and illustrate the volume entitled Le Panama et Mes Sept Oncles. Dos Passos paints his own watercolors for the book and writes a foreword in which he acknowledges his artistic debt to Cendrars. “The poetry of Blaise Cendrars,” he writes, “was part of the creative tidal wave that spread over the world from the Paris of before the last European war.”