In the early 1940s, while World War II was spreading throughout Europe, the U.S. government sponsored translations of works by Latin American writers, and the State Department invited experts to lecture on Latin American literature at colleges. After the war, the U.S. government introduced the Point Four Program to counter the influence of the Soviet Union and its communism over developing and Third World countries. The U.S.-based Ford and Rockefeller Foundations seconded the efforts of the government to shape the agenda of the arts and social sciences in Latin America. Also, the Faulkner Foundation created in the 1950s the Ibero-American Novel Project. It followed the desire of Faulkner, who used part of the money from his Nobel Prize in Literature to create fellowships for Latin American writers. The goal was to promote the work of established and upcoming novelists from the region. One of its early beneficiaries was Donoso. His first novel, Coronation, received the 1962 Ibero-American Award from the foundation. These awards led to important professional connections and growing excitement about the future of the region’s literature. Donoso himself recalled that Scottish literary scholar Alistair Reid told him that Vargas Llosa was going “to be one of the greatest novelists of his time.” Reid also gave him a copy of Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero. Shortly after, in 1964, Donoso published in the leading Chilean magazine Ercilla an enthusiastic book review with the subtitle “The Novel that Triumphs Worldwide.”36
Starting in 1962, cultural philanthropist Rodman Rockefeller and editor Alfred Knopf helped fund the symposia organized by the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts. Three years later, the symposium met in Chichén-Itzá, Mexico. Among its participants were writers William Styron, Oscar Lewis, Nicanor Parra, Juan García Ponce, Donoso, Rulfo, Fuentes, Sábato, and García Márquez. At this meeting, García Márquez and Donoso consoled each other about their writer’s block. Having the chance to talk about his writing problems with peers helped him, since a few weeks later he put his writer’s block behind him and started working on One Hundred Years of Solitude. The following year, the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts changed its name to Center for Inter-American Relations and, thanks to the advice of critic Rodríguez Monegal, it shifted its focus away from symposia to the promotion of Latin American books. In ten years, the center sponsored the translation into English of fifty titles, including One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Like the United States, communist Soviet Union and China promoted Latin American writers. Although more research is necessary to fully understand this promotion, two of the most popular writers in the region before the 1960s, Amado and Neruda, were under the spell of the Soviet Union. Their works were translated and circulated in the countries behind the Iron Curtain as well as in China. The Soviet Union also tempted budding writers. In 1957, a thirty-year-old García Márquez traveled to Moscow to attend the Sixth World Youth Festival as a member of a Colombian cultural delegation. Four years later, the Latin American Institute opened its doors in this city. In Latin America, the Soviet Union gave not only ideological but also cultural support to the Cuban Revolution. One of its many initiatives was to fund the Cuban book industry. With this purpose in mind, a Czech-Russian book-publishing consortium started to operate on the island. Soon after, “Soviet-financed books [were] sold in South America at what we would call nominal prices, about a third of the price of Spanish books.”37
In Spain, high-ranking officials of the Franco government were as concerned as their U.S. counterparts about the growing threat of the Cuban book industry, with its cheap pro-Soviet titles and writers. But Spanish officials were equally worried about the threat of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. U.S. funding for writers, books, and publishers endangered Spain’s geo-cultural power over the book industry in Latin America. Thus, Spanish institutions sought to influence the region through journals such as Mundo Hispánico and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, organizations such as Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, professional meetings such as Congreso de Instituciones Hispánicas, summer courses, cultural travels, and fellowships for Latin American students. Fellowships, in particular, connected Latin America to Spain by co-opting its artists, as was the case for the twenty-two-year-old Vargas Llosa, who left Peru to study in Madrid.38
For France, Latin America was also a target of cultural entrepreneurship. French interventions included journals, professorships, book collections, and organizations. The Maison de l’Amérique Latine was created in Paris in 1945, while the Institut Français d’Amérique Latine opened branches in the capitals of Mexico, Haiti, Chile, and Peru. The same year the prestigious Collège de France established the chair on literature and language of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. And France’s leading literary publisher, Gallimard, created in the early 1950s the pioneering collection La Croix du Sud. This collection promoted the region’s literature, mostly novels. Among its forty-two titles, there were indigenists, cosmopolitans, and Brazilian authors. The director of this collection was the French critic Roger Caillois. He lived in Buenos Aires as a World War II refugee. During his stay, he met Borges and his circle and became familiar with the region’s literature. When he returned to France, Borges’s Ficciones was the first volume in La Croix du Sud, and its publication in this collection started a national interest in Latin American writers that peaked in the 1960s. Caillois also directed UNESCO’s Collection d’oeuvre representatives, which published works by “Ibero-American” authors. Its titles included foundational fictions from the nineteenth century such as Sarmiento’s Facundo, groundbreaking writers such as Martí, and up-and-coming contemporary writers such as Paz. This collection promoted Latin American 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