Fuentes sold all five hundred copies printed. That number was “considered a wild success,” as he recalled on a TV interview with a smile on his face. “Today,” he added, “a novel easily sells fifty thousand copies.” This change in book sales described by Fuentes occurred abruptly in the 1960s, when García Márquez was a rising literary star. The modernization of the Spanish-language publishing industry turned the ideas and manuscripts of Latin American authors into commodities, mostly books, which consumers were eager to buy. No longer were these consumers a “lettered minority” of local educated elites and peer writers. As illiteracy rates dropped across the region, these new consumers were an expanding audience of university students and middle-class readers. And this modernization meant many authors were able to live off their writing. In comparison to the publishing boom in the 1960s, “Not even Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, or Miguel Ángel Asturias, giants from an earlier generation,” as scholar Gerald Martin puts it, “could have dreamed of such favorable terms of trade when they first came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.”3
What usually goes unsaid is that it would have been inconceivable for novels such as One Hundred Years Solitude to reach the stage of production if gatekeepers of the Spanish-language publishing industry—in particular literary agents, acquisition editors, and publishers—had not participated actively in the literary imagination that these writers believed in. Put differently, the organizational conditions in which gatekeepers made their decisions about what to publish mattered. And it also mattered a great deal how their decisions were influenced by writers’ aesthetic beliefs. Therefore, these gatekeepers were not simply profit seekers; they were also believers. They came to believe in their clients’ agenda for Latin American literature. And to help their clients move their literary works from the imagination stage into production and circulation, gatekeepers did two things effectively. They made sure, first, that these literary works were standardized and, second, that they circulated transnationally.
Regarding standardization, gatekeepers used their resources to market the works by writers of three generations as if they belonged to a single literary movement. By signing some writers (as opposed to others), gatekeepers helped to shape the literary mainstream in the region in the 1960s. This standardization of the publishing agenda began the creation of a literary tradition (and region-spanning nationalism) that complemented the agenda found in region-spanning periodicals. Yet gatekeepers did more than use their resources to publish Latin American writers. In searching for potential artists in the region, gatekeepers were transformed by the imagination of the writers, especially by the literary viewpoint of cosmopolitan Latin Americanism. Once gatekeepers believed in this viewpoint, they helped writers transform it into a commercial brand. In doing so, gatekeepers started to participate in (and influence) writers’ imaginations. Thanks to this convergence between writers and gatekeepers, the norms, principles, and conventions that writers had developed in the stage of imagination did not die, so to speak, in front of gatekeepers’ gates. Rather, such norms, principles, and conventions became part of the imagination of gatekeepers, who ought to believe that these writers’ viewpoint could give a literary work its novelty, prestige, and marketability. This convergence meant that publishers such as Seix Barral and Sudamericana and literary agent Carmen Balcells became leading advocates of the cosmopolitan Latin Americanism that defined the region’s literature in the 1960s.4
And regarding transnational circulation, the Spanish-language publishing industry achieved an unprecedented feat: its books traveled like those in no other epoch before it. A transatlantic publishing circuit reached its peak. Writers in Latin America, aware of the prestige and larger distribution available by publishing their work with a leading Spanish press, began to do so. Thanks to this circuit, on the one hand, Latin American writers exported literary ideas and manuscripts to Spain. And, on the other hand, publishers in Spain turned them into books sold nationally and in Latin America. Under these favorable conditions, Spanish publishers produced thousands of cheap paperbacks that were sold in Spain and Latin America. A center of this transnational circuit was not in the region but in a different country and continent: the city of Barcelona. By the mid-1960s, this circuit was in full swing and readers in Spain and Latin America faced an avalanche of Latin American literary works.5
A DIVIDED AND LOCAL PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
Small print runs, few new literary titles, rampant piracy, and local circulation made it impossible for most authors to live off their writing in Latin America until the 1960s. The situation of the publishing industry was so negative that it reduced the achievements of the region-spanning intellectual class that emerged in the early twentieth century.6 The audience for most literary works was mainly fellow writers, friends, literary salon attendees, and readers of local periodicals. Rather than a full-time professional, the typical author was a weekend writer. And rather than books, writers wrote for periodicals, since they were the dominant form of publication for new literary works, including novels, which often appeared in installments. Publishing with a regional press that could reach a transnational audience was a dream only within the reach of a minority of senior writers. García Márquez had to wait two decades to attain his dream of finding a Latin American publisher. As he wrote to a critic, “I was distressed to see my books in local editions, and scattered across different publishers,” which hindered their regional circulation. Despite the initial success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, newspapers in Peru and Colombia described readers’ difficulties buying copies, due to poor book distribution or hefty importation tariffs.7
Given the state of the publishing industry in the region, it is not surprising that the most widespread literary form until the 1960s was the short form: poems, essays, and short stories. This state of this industry shaped what writers in the Short Form, Hybrid, and Novel Generations produced until then—each generation defined by the format of works by its most influential members. Writers had to adapt to see their works published in serial format, printed in small numbers, circulated locally and, if sold abroad, pirated. Borges, a member of the Short Form Generation, published his first book in 1923. It was a collection of poems entitled Fervor de Buenos Aires and was printed by a local publisher. Its print run was three hundred copies. Recalling his experience, he said, “It did not occur to me to take a single copy to bookstores, nor to newspapers, and there was no talk of success or failure.” It took years to sell all the copies, mostly bought in Buenos Aires. Several of the poems in the book, for which he received no royalties, first appeared in newspapers and magazines in Spain. The debut book by Julio Cortázar, a member of the Hybrid Generation, sold two hundred copies. It was a collection of short stories entitled Bestiary (1951) and included “House Taken Over,” a short story previously published in a small local magazine in Buenos Aires run by Borges. A decade was necessary to sell the initial print run. Another member of Cortázar’s generation, Juan Rulfo, said, “I was frustrated” because “the first editions [of my short stories] were never sold. They had print runs of two thousand copies [and the ones] that circulated did so because I had given them away. I gave away half of the print run.” García Márquez, a member of the Novel Generation, did the same with the copies of his first book, Leaf Storm. And the second, No One Writes to the Colonel, was originally published in a Colombian magazine, and he received no royalties for it.8
Although an analysis by word count would be more precise, the publishing output in number of pages by members of each generation confirms the popularity of short forms of literature before the 1960s. For the Short Form Generation, the average length of the works published between 1923 and 1959 was 151 pages. In the 1960s, when the New Latin American Novel rose, the average length went over two hundred pages, since members of this generation published more frequently and wrote longer books. Asturias, for example, published four novels, one novella, and three books of essays. Carpentier published his longest novel until then, Explosion in a Cathedral (423 pages). And José Lezama Lima, who for the past three decades wrote mainly poetry, published his monumental novel Paradiso (617 pages). In the Hybrid Generation, Ernesto Sábato, who until 1961 had authored a novella and a book of essays, published his first novel, On Heroes and Tombs (417 pages). And Cortázar, known as a short-story writer, attained international recognition in 1963 with the publication
