Playwright, short-story writer, novelist, and essayist, René Marqués was the most gifted and internationally visible member of the group of Puerto Rican writers of the 1950s that the poet Juan Antonio Corretjer called the "Desperate Generation." Marqués raised the technical standards of each of the genres he cultivated, and he set the tone for much of the prose writing of his generation. The tone of that writing was generally one of existential anguish and profound anxiety, permeated by a nostalgia for the vanishing (and idealized) rural way of life. Invoking the works of existentialist thinkers from Miguel de Unamuno to Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, Marqués produced a violent, tragic vision of Puerto Rican culture, which left a significant imprint in the Puerto Rican literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout these two decades Marqués was the dominant literary...