SOURCE: Spell, Jefferson Rea. “Ricardo Güiraldes: Stylistic Depictor of the Gaucho.” In Contemporary Spanish-American Fiction, pp. 191-204. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

In the following essay, Spell examines Ricardo Güiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra, a book he believes to have achieved its popular acclaim through its accurate depictions of gaucho life and vernacular.

The most distinctive of all Spanish-American literature—the literature linked most directly with the country and the people—is the so-called “gaucho” literature of the River Plate region. Pioneers of this type of literature were three long narrative poems—Ascasubi's Santos Vega, 1851, Estanislao del Campo's Fausto, 1866, and José Hernández's Martín Fierro, 1872—all of singular merit. Worthy writers of prose inspired by the gaucho did not appear until the turn of the century. Of these, two deserve mention: Roberto Payró, an Argentine, celebrated for his novelette El Casamiento de Laucha, 1906, and...