Drawing on his own adventures in the Spanish countryside, Dos Passos writes a story of two nomads walking from Madrid to Toledo in the years after World War I. Their travel interweaves Spanish customs, literature, and art. For the author, the country never ceases to tease the imagination.

Editor and historian Stewart Mitchell says “Dos Passos is at his best on the high road; he paints better than he explains. For all his diving and spinning [Dos Passos is] a pilot who loves life—and words, perhaps, most of all.”

“The wonderful thing about Spain,” Dos Passos writes in a letter, “speaking of togas, is that it is a sort of temple of anachronisms. I’ve never been any where where you so felt the strata of civilization—Celt-Iberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and French have each passed through Spain and left something there—alive.”