as a mythic place and a place of hope. It is now a sad, dark and sanguinary continent where foreign money and technology, with the help of a wild, grotesque variety of local military thugs, is prepared to do anything, cross every threshold that separates an ordinary society of conventional decencies from a world of abominations, in order to maximise profits and make the extraction ot wealth more efficient. Indeed, modem Latin America, which has known all the pains and the griefs of hell, is an awful reminder to us of what we ourselves could become if the few economic and political restraints we still have left were to break down and if the rhetoric of non-violence and peace which is still a part of our discourse were to be completely erased. Twentieth-century Latin American literature is important because it struggles to make coherent for us a society which has endured such sorrow and desolation as to baffle our imagination and disorient our capacities for simple rational judgements. In addition, it tries to affirm, sometimes with utter generosity and kindliness, at other times almost despairingly and without hope. the possibility of living once again in communities which would restore righteousness amongst human beings and give sanctity to aU created things. The Latin American novelist or poet of our age is, thus, both a political analyst and a maker of moral fables; what he writes is a complex and fabulous mixture of anger, truth, nostalgia, protest, hope; his work in simultaneously a complete inventory of the phantasmogoria that his land has become and a yearning for a common, daily world of family affections and traditions, friendship and love. II It is fortunate for a majority of us who know neither Spanish or Portuguese that the works of the major Latin American writers are beginning to be made available in English. The notes that follow on some of the most representative of the Latin American writers of the cetitury will, I hope, help those who are interested in reading the literature of the continent more extensively and also enable them-to make for themselves a historical and literary map of the region. My intention is to provide brief biographical information about the authors and to indicate the moral and political range of their concerns. I have also tried to indicate their attitudes towards important and troubling questions of colonialism and power, revolution and technology, the freedom of a creative artist to dissent and the needs of the State or its dictators, the value ofpre-Colombian myths and rituals for the present and the kinds of good societies we ought to dream of making. My list of authors presented here is admittedly fragmentary and partial. I wish I had written upon the great modem poets like Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) and Vincente Huidobro (1893-1948) or upon interesting novels like The Violent 100 January-June 1985