SOURCE: "Fiction from Latin America," in What's in a Novel, Columbia University Press, 1942, pp. 169-96.

In the following essay, Haines provides an overview of several Latin American novels published during the early 1940s.

There must come a conception of life which, without denying the fundamental union between man and the earth would lift him past the barriers that had held him back until then to lead him to the more complete forms of existence.

—Ciro Alegria: Broad and Alien Is the World

To the vast majority of readers in the United States, Latin American fiction is more remote, more exotic, than any of the fiction of Europe. The two Américas share a hemisphere; they have never shared a common understanding. Underlying their deep separation are fundamental differences in folk roots, in historical development, in religion, in social and cultural conditions that set up barriers to mutual sympathetic...