Ciro Alegría is unanimously considered Peru's first classic novelist, but he is much more. Writing during the decline of the regionalist novel, he consistently transformed and enriched the tradition of this literary movement in Spanish America while maintaining a sense of realism. He tried his best to ascertain and express the true identity of the peasant classes in his novels, short stories, and fables.

Ciro Alegría Bazan was born on 4 November 1909 at the Quilca hacienda in Sartimbaba, a remote district of Huamachuco, a province located in the northern mountains of Peru. His family belonged to the old-world, Andean landed class, which includes precisely the exploitive caciques whom the so-called indigenist novelists, including Alegría, never tire of censuring. Yet, according to him, his grandfather and father distinguished themselves from other landowners by managing their haciendas in a kindly, patriarchal fashion--a marked contrast to...