The United States looms large in the Latin American literary imagination. From Domingo Sarmiento and José Martí in the nineteenth century to Octavio Paz and Alberto Fuguet in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many Latin American writers have depicted the United States in their writings and pondered the cultural and historical significance of their powerful neighbor to the north. But perhaps no Latin American writer has had as close—and complicated—a relationship with the United States as Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes was a fierce critic of American culture and United States foreign policy; at the same time, there was much that he admired about the United States, and it was clear that he was eager to have his voice heard here.

Who was andré Jolles? born in den helder in 1874; raised in amsterdam; in his youth a significant player in the literary Movement of the Nineties (Beweging van Negentig), whose organ was the Dutch cultural weekly De Kroniek; a close friend of Aby M. Warburg's and Johan Huizinga's—Jolles studied art history at Freiburg beginning in 1902 and then taught art history in Berlin, archaeology and cultural history in occupied Ghent during World War I, and Netherlandic and comparative literature at Leipzig from 1919 until shortly before his death, in 1946. A man of extraordinary intellectual range—his publications include essays on early Florentine painting, a dissertation on the aesthetics of Vitruvius, a habilitation thesis on Egyptian-Mycenaean ceremonial vessels, literary letters on ancient Greek art, and essays in German and Dutch on folklore, theater, dance, Boccaccio, Dante, Goethe, Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Provençal and Renaissance Italian poetry—he was also an amateur playwright and an outspoken champion of modern trends in dramatic art and stage design. To his friends, he could be something of an intellectual midwife, helping Warburg to formulate what would become a signature notion, the “pathos formula,” and Huizinga to conceive The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). Jolles's chief work, the one for which he is best known, is Einfache Formen (1930; “Simple Forms”), a collection of lectures he had delivered in German at Leipzig in 1927-28 and revised.

Introduction

Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

In spring 1513 Juan Ponce de León sailed north from Puerto Rico, cruised the Bahamas, and touched land somewhere on the southeastern corner of what is now the mainland United States. The season being Easter, and because of the “beautiful view of the many cool woodlands,” Ponce de León called the peninsula, which he believed an island, la Pascua Florida (T. Davis 17, 57). The rest of the story is decidedly less poetic. A squabble with Christopher Columbus's family, involving broader matters of legal jurisdiction, had driven the conquistador to new territories. His time in la Florida was brief but violent. After claiming ownership, Ponce de León provisioned his ships, skirmished with the natives, took hostages, then rounded the Martires (or Keys), where he met unfriendly Calusa on the gulf side (T. Davis 17-22). In February 1521 he returned, this time as adelantado, or governor, and again met the Calusa—who dealt him a mortal wound to the thigh. Ponce died in La Habana (Fernandina) the following July, and he now lies in the cathedral of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Manuel GonzÁlez prada (1844-1918), like inca garcilaso de la vega, César vallejo, josé marÍa arguedas, and mario vargas llosa, ranks among the top Peruvian literary figures, but only in Peru, where his work is hotly debated by literati, social scientists, historians, politicians, and journalists. Outside Peru he rates no more than the inclusion in anthologies of one of his poems; his most famous essay, “Nuestros indios” (“Our Indians”); or the occasional critical article on his work. However, with the Cuban José Martí (1853-95), González Prada is a founder of Latin American modernism, a movement that critics generally accept as running roughly from the publication of Rubén Darío's Azul, in 1888, to Darío's death, in 1916. Gordon Brotherston notes that Darío coined the term modernismo the same year he published Azul (vii). There are many reasons there has been less interest in González Prada than in Martí and other modernists. To begin with, Darío, in an 1888 visit to Peru, met with Ricardo Palma but not González Prada (Castro). Palma, writing in a more traditional style—even though he invented a genre, tradiciones—was the establishment's literary darling, while González Prada, always the innovator in style and an agitator in subject matter, remained largely unknown outside his native land. Thus, it made perfect sense that the maker of literary movements would visit the internationally known Palma but not González Prada, who could not add to his fame and expanding literary networks. Furthermore, when Darío later went to New York he turned his epistolary relationship with Martí into a personal friendship (Henríquez Ureña 93). In the United States there is much more interest in Martí, who lived here, than in González Prada, who did not. Hispanic modernism is typically understood to include the like-minded people whom Darío knew personally, such as Martí, Julián del Casal (Cuba), Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (Mexico), Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia), and Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain), and to exclude those whom he did not, such as Adela Zamudio (Bolivia) and González Prada. Finally, González Prada's anarchism, his feminism, and his tell-it-like-it-is essays did not endear him to many people.