In his own day R. B. Cunninghame Graham was seen as a colorful personality and was often likened to Don Quixote as a passionate idealist in a cynical age. As a writer and scholar he was an unremitting critic of what he considered an effete and materialistic Western civilization; he sought to record for a comfortable bourgeoisie his remembered impressions of the more elemental life he had encountered in Latin America, the southwestern United States, North Africa, and Scotland. His principal literary genre was the sketch--an elusive form, usually reminiscent but sometimes narrative, sometimes essayistic, sometimes wholly fictional, and sometimes unabashedly autobiographical. The common feature of his sketches is their brevity: most are fewer than ten pages in length. He was regarded by friends and fellow writers such as W. H. Hudson and Joseph Conrad as a writer's writer; if he is neglected today, it may be because...