The prose and poetry of Vladan Desnica constitute a vital link in a long line of works by writers such as Vladimir Nazor, Dinko Simunovic, Petar Segedin, Vjekoslav Kaleb, and Ranko Marinkovic that succeeds in capturing the essence of life in their time in the villages and towns of Dalmatia. His writing, like that of Segedin and Marinkovic, embodied and introduced to the national literature narrative techniques (interior monologue, the unreliable narrator, and so forth) that reveal the preoccupation in the modern era with human psychology and the human ability to cope with ever-more-rapid social changes. Like some of these writers, Desnica also contributed to the cultural and political life of his country as it changed shape and changed names. Yet Desnica holds a special position among his colleagues when viewed from the perspective of the late twentieth century: he was the only Serb among them. Desnica inherited...