The newest addition to the Scribner's writers series traces the literary history of Mexico, Central America, the island republics, and both Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking South America from colonial times to the present day. The articles, in chronological order and averaging ten pages in length, range from Bartolome de las Casas (1474-1565), the Spanish Dominican missionary who successfully railed against enslavement of the Indians, to Reinaldo Arenas (1943- ), the Cuban novelist who fled to the United States in 1980. In all, the three-volume set covers 176 representative writers from twenty countries and spans five hundred years. Includes critical studies of poets, novelists, and playwrights as well as journalists, statesmen, revolutionaries, clergy, diarists, and philosophers, some known internationally, such as Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz, others known throughout Latin America, and still others known only in certain areas, times, or fields of interest. Indexed as a whole. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or. Read Less