by Américo Castro

Américo Castro (1885-1972) was born in Brazil to Antonio Castro and Carmen Quesada, Spanish merchants who returned to Spain with the family when their infant boy was four. Castro grew up in Granada, earned his doctorate at the University of Madrid, and went on to forge a revolutionary new vision of Spain in respect to its history and culture. The publication of his El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925; The Thought of Cervantes) established Castro as a globally influential Cervantes scholar. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, a void was created by the disappearance of Spain’s two foremost journals—the Revista de Occidente (Journal of the Occident) founded in 1923 by José Ortega y Gasset and the Revista de Filología Española (Journal of Spanish Philology), edited by Ramón...