12 1/4 pages (11 x 8 1/2 in.; 279 x 215 mm), Provincetown, Mass., [1937], ribbon copy, double-spaced, paginated 38-50, author’s name and address in his holograph at top of first page, with his note “(fourth article),” and the editorial department stamp; with extensive ink holograph revisions by Dos Passos throughout (about 115 words in his hand), plus deletions and typographical corrections, the setting copy with editorial corrections and markings in red pencil; first page with faint marginal soiling and some minor nicks and chips, last page a little wrinkled.

"A city under siege is not a very good place for a sightseer." This vivid account of a day in Madrid during a bombardment by General Franco’s fascist forces first appeared in Esquire magazine for January 1938, where it was the fourth in Dos Passos’ series of five reports on the Spanish Civil War. It was collected, with the other pieces, in the author’s Journeys Between Wars (published April 1938) under the new title “Madrid Under Siege.” The Hotel Florida was where the foreign journalists stayed and it is the setting for Hemingway’s play about the siege of the Spanish capital, The Fifth Column (1938). Dos Passos manuscript material is rare.

Dos Passos writes: “Fro♚m the west came a scattered hollow popping, soft perforations of the distant horizon. Somewhere not very far away men with every nerve tense were crawling along the dark sides of walls, keeping their heads down in trenches, yanking their right arms back to sling a handgrenade at some creeping shadow opposite. And in all the black houses the children we'd seen playing in the streꦆets were asleep, and the grownups were lying there thinking of lost friends and family and ruins and people they'd loved and of haying the enemy and of hunger and how to get a little more food tomorrow, feeling in the numbness of their blood, in spite of whatever scorn in the face of death, the low unending smoulder of apprehension of a city under siege."