[1] When he returned to the United States in 1936 to become an assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he brought the only complete print of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.
In late 1943, during World War II, Leyda joined the U.S. Army Tank Corps at Fort Knox.
These scholars moved beyond the acceptance of Melville's first-person accounts in his works as reliably autobiographical.
To provide concrete evidence, Leyda searched libraries, family papers, local archives and newspapers across New England and New York to gather The Melville Log (1951) to document Melville's day to day activities and transactions.
[5][6] He was professor and dissertation advisor to noted film historian, Charles H. Harpole (creator of the ten volume History of American Cinema, dedicated to Leyda); leading film theorist, Tom Gunning; and scholar-practitioner Charles Musser.