literature as a unified and well-established tradition.39
Along with the strategies of different nations, the works of several generations of scholars were important to consolidate the idea of Latin American literature. While several of the contributions cited below still understood the region’s literature as a collection of national traditions, there was a growing recognition that “in a large part of Spanish-American literature there is an American spirit that differentiates it from that of the mother country,” as a U.S. professor put it in 1925. This recognition that the region’s literature was no longer an appendix of Spain’s literature appeared in textbooks and anthologies published in and outside the region. Some of these titles are Luis Alberto Sánchez’s Historia de la literatura americana (1937), Óscar Rafael Beltrán’s Manual de historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (1938), Arturo Torres-Rioseco’s La gran literatura iberoamericana (1945), Ensayos sobre literatura latinoamericana (1953 and 1958), Nueva historia de la gran literatura iberoamericana (1960), and Aspects of Spanish American Literature (1963), Harriet de Onís’s The Golden Land: An Anthology of Latin American Folklore in Literature (1948), Julio Leguizamón’s Bibliografía general de la literatura hispanoamericana (1954), the six volumes of Diccionario de la literatura latinoamericana (1958), Ugo Gallo and Giuseppe Bellini’s Storia della letteratura ispanoamericana (1958), Fernando Alegría’s Breve historia de la novela hispanoamericana (1959), José Luis Sánchez Trincado’s Literatura latinoamericana, siglo XX (1964), Zum Felde’s La narrativa en Hispanoamérica (1964), John Englekirk’s An Outline History of Spanish American Literature (1965), Raimundo Lazo’s Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana (1965), and Juan Loveluck’s La novela hispanoamericana (1966). An important voice in this field was that of Pedro Henríquez Ureña, author of the influential Literary Currents in Hispanic America (1945), and arguably the first Latin American literary scholar. Among his main contributions was to develop the idea of a unified “Latin culture” that embraced Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries.40
Luis Harss’s Into the Mainstream (1966) occupies a special place in this scholarship on Latin American literature. Originally published in English, it was instantly translated into Spanish as Los Nuestros (literally, Ours). This book was not an anthology of literary texts but a series of long conversations with ten writers. Into the Mainstream brought together as a single literary tradition, that of Latin American literature, writers from the three generations, including a Brazilian author. The selected writers were Carpentier, Asturias, Borges, Guimarães Rosa, Onetti (Short Form Generation), Cortázar, Rulfo (Hybrid Generation), and Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa (Novel Generation). In his conversation with Harss, García Márquez described at length and for the first time his book in progress, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This conversation turned out to be an unexpected means of promoting his novel, because Into the Mainstream became a best seller in Argentina in the months prior to the release of the novel.
Topping the consolidation of Latin American literature were major awards. In general, the impact of an award goes beyond the personal beneficiary, as it can create group closure, spark imitation, and attract the attention of publishers, critics, and scholars.41 In 1945, Latin America received its first Nobel Prize in Literature. Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral won it just months after the end of World War II “for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world.” Indeed, for the Nobel committee, Mistral was not a Chilean but a Latin American author. This Nobel sent the message to writers in Latin America that a region-spanning literature, one that was independent from Spain, was gaining international attention among powerful gatekeepers. Barely a decade later, in 1956, the second Nobel Prize in Literature traveled to the region. The laurate was the Spanish poet in exile, Juan Ramón Jiménez. He had been publishing in the Americas for the past two decades and was involved in the region’s literary scene. In 1960, only four years after J. R. Jiménez’s win, poet Saint-John Perse, born in the French-American territory of Guadeloupe, received the Nobel. Partisans of a region-spanning Latin American literature such as Fuentes and Carpentier considered the Caribbean and even French Canada as part of Latin America. So for them, the Nobel given to this Caribbean poet further recognized the region’s cultural independence and its autonomous literary voice. Two other Nobel awards in literature followed in the next decade or so for Asturias (1967) and Neruda (1971). According to the Nobel committee, the merit of their work was once more that it spoke for the region as a whole. Aspiring professional writers in Latin America kept up with the news about these and other Nobel winners. So did García Márquez. In 1950, when he was twenty-three years old and had published no book of fiction, he was already commenting in his daily newspaper column about the merits of Nobel laurates in Literature.42
Along with these Nobel Prizes in Literature, Latin American writers received a growing number of awards in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1952, Asturias won in France the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) for El Señor Presidente, a novel about a Latin American dictator. In 1959, Vargas Llosa published The Leaders, which received a Spanish award named after Leopoldo Alas, one of the country’s leading nineteenth-century writers. In 1961, Onetti’s “Jacob and the Other” was a finalist in the short story contest recently created by Life en Español magazine. The same year, Borges and Irish playwright Samuel Beckett together won the Prix International des Éditeurs awarded by the Formentor Group. In 1962, as mentioned earlier, Coronation by Donoso received the Ibero-American Award from the Faulkner Foundation. The following year, Vargas Llosa published The Time of the Hero, which won the Biblioteca Breve and Crítica awards in Spain. These and other awards attracted the interest of international publishers. In 1964, U.S. publishing house Harper & Row created a division on Latin American literature. It moved fast and signed many writers from the region; a year later it had an option to publish García Márquez’s next work, One Hundred Years of Solitude.43 These awards also attracted the attention of region-spanning periodicals, which were key to promoting Latin American literature among hundreds of thousands of middle-class readers.
PERIODICALS FOR A NEW LITERATURE
Nowhere was the effervescence of Latin American literature more visible than in literary journals, current affairs magazines, and weekend supplements of newspapers. From the 1920s onward, a handful of literary magazines started to imagine the region’s literature as a tradition that was independent from Spain and Europe. These periodicals circulated poorly among the mass public, had small print runs, and were mainly discussed in intellectual circles. But they set the foundations for a Latin American and cosmopolitan community of writers because they emphasized regional unity over difference. Their readership increased in the 1940s and especially the 1950s. Then, general interest magazines spread to cater to the literary tastes of the rising urban middle classes, following the models set by Time, Newsweek, Life, L’Express, and Paris Match. By the 1960s, many periodicals had become taste-making publications that promoted a regional cosmopolitan culture.44
For this period, some influential periodicals were Sur, Panorama, El Escarabajo de Oro, and Primera Plana in Argentina, Contemporáneos, El Hijo Pródigo, Cuadernos Americanos, México en la Cultura of Novedades de México, Revista Mexicana de literatura, La Cultura en México of Siempre!, and Diálogos in Mexico, Marcha in Uruguay, Cromos, Mito, Crónica, and Eco in Colombia, Orígenes, Carteles, and Casa de las Américas in Cuba, Papel Literario of El Nacional, Imagen, Zona Franca, and Papeles: Revista del Ateneo de Caracas in Venezuela, Amauta and Amaru in Peru, Repertorio Americano in Costa Rica, Clima in Brazil, Ercilla in Chile, Asomante in Puerto Rico, Mundo Nuevo in France, and Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista Iberoamericana, and Life en Español in the United States. At least twelve of these periodicals, published in eight countries and distributed in more than twenty, featured or reviewed work by García
