This paper aims to shed light on how the Luso-American writer John Dos Passos and his oeuvre were submitted to censorship during the Estado Novo (“New State”), the Portuguese dictatorship that lasted from 1933 to 1974.
A short introduction will explain how censorship functioned and how other North-American writers, such as Upton Sinclair, Howard Fast, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Normal Mailer were blue-penciled, too.
After this general overview, I shall explore in depth how John Dos Passos was subjected to cuttings and banning. Based on his particular case, I will show what the bowdlerization eventually meant for the author. In doing so, I will mention and quote from—so far—inedited archive documents, namely the existing censorship reports on John Dos Passos, i.e., the reports on Adventures of a Young Man, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money, and Chosen Country.