The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles

When American authors John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway went to Spain in 1937 to witness the Spanish Civil War firsthand, the devastation they encountered was far from impersonal: As Spain was unraveling thread by thread, so was the relationship between these two literary titans. They had arrived in Spain as comrades, leftist writers-in-arms. But a real-life literary mystery unfolded when Dos Passos’ friend José Robles—a Spanish-born Johns Hopkins professor—disappeared. Written from a nov…