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 Márquez before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Thus, thousands of readers in three continents first encountered his literary work in periodicals rather than in books.45
As García Márquez and his peers realized, the main advantage of these magazines, journals, and literary supplements was twofold. First, they broadened the audience for regional literature. As critic Rama wrote, “The magazines were capital instruments of modernization and the hierarchy of literary activity: replacing specialized publications intended only for the restricted cultivated public, mainly formed by writers themselves; these magazines established communication with a larger audience.” Given the limited amount of space on their pages, they were the perfect vehicle to promote short literary works (poetry, short stories, and essays) as well as excerpts of forthcoming novels.46
Second, these periodicals reported what was really going on in literature all over the region and beyond. In these publications, regional readers could find essays about mainstream Latin American (including Brazilians), Spanish, and international writers. They published literary criticism about famous and best-selling works, news about meetings of writers, reviews of books and cultural events, news about recipients of regional and international literary awards, announcements of book releases, and letters from readers reacting to literary works. A regular section was the reportage on new and upcoming national writers and generations, and especially the interview. In these interviews, writers talked about their works and the craft of writing. The reporting also presented the writers as public figures, inserting them in the mass media commercial circuit, and sometimes portraying them as agents of social change in the region. Scores of writers embraced this promotion. Benedetti put in words what many of his colleagues thought at the time when he wrote, “The Latin American . . . writer cannot close the doors to reality.” Writers, he insisted, could not waste this opportunity to influence their readers.47
Primera Plana was one of the general interest magazines that allowed writers to influence readers across the region. Since its creation in 1962, Primera Plana conducted surveys to measure its penetration among highbrow readers. By 1964, it had a weekly print run of sixty thousand copies, with an average of two hundred and fifty thousand readers. The same year critic Tomás Eloy Martínez took over. Under his leadership, Primera Plana gave more space to literature, including covers featuring writers from the three generations: Borges, Lezama Lima, Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Leopoldo Marechal, and García Márquez. It also published their work and that of Sábato, Puig, Fuentes, Macedonio Fernández, Armonía Somers, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade,