A writer who draws on his own experiences for his fiction has first to understand their meaning for him. John Dos Passes was no exception. During his last two years as an undergraduate at Harvard from 1914 to 1916, he began to put his memories of early childhood in perspective by describing them in essays that merely hint at the themes which would later appear in his novels. He was already endeavoring to comprehend the role of his childhood in making him the person he had become, Then, 14 months after being graduated from Harvard, he saw more clearly the relationship between his childhood and the world beyond his experiences when the shock of World War I heightened his rebellious instincts. War was not at all what official rhetoric proclaimed. The fighting was horrendous, even absurd, he quickly discerned while he drove ambulances as a Norton-Harjes volunteer in the Verdun sector of the Western Front during the late summer of 1917, and after, as a Red Cross volunteer along the Italian front around Bassano at the end of 1917 and during the first half of 1918."How ridiculous [the war] is!" he wrote in his diary as he headed in convoy toward Verdun. He cursed "all the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false." Three weeks later, after serving in a major French offensive against the Germans, he asserted to his young friend Rumsey Marvin that "the war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer of lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting." Dos Passes, like his sometime friend Ernest Hemingway and others of the generation of writers who emerged from the war, rebelled against the old truths—against the "abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow" that Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms learned to hate, Dos Passos came to understand that in his childhood he had been imbued with the attitudes of the established middle class; he had been taught to be "nice" and to think, as he wrote in his diary in January 1918, that "ingrained taboos" were at the core of life.

By the time he wrote in his diary that January, he was confident he had broken free of the "morbidities & fastidious barriers" which had held him in thrall."I realize there is no all the world to be in rapport with, "he told himself. At least the war had taught him that much, he thought, and he declared, "I'm a much heartier son of a bitch than I used to be much readier to slap my cock against the rocks of fact." When he bragged thus, he was already in the midst of writing his first real protest, a never-to-be-published novel entitled Seven Times Round the Walls of Jericho. Its fourth part became his first published book, One Man's Initiation: 1917. Henceforth in his fiction he would protest repeatedly against society's strictures, and repeatedly he would portray some part of his own childhood as an inhibiting time from which one or another character had to struggle clear.