Blanco Fombona possesses irony, the gift of telling a story, a rich descriptive talent, ease of dialogue, and a power of forcible scene-painting. A novelist by temperament, he has written the biography of a representative Creole, the lamentable type created by environment, for whom love and life reserve their most terrible cruelties. A scrupulous employé, neither strong nor cunning, he is the product of the languorous tropical life; this "man of iron" is the symbol of all the weaknesses. And about this life is all the monotony of a small city, civil war, the secret hatred of Creoles and foreigners, the superannuated grace of the Spanish manner and the Spanish pomp--in short, the whole of a little seething world. _Canaan_ is the romance of the promised land, of fertile Brazil, where the blonde immigrant and the half-breeds of every shade compete for the bounty of a prodigal Nature. This long struggle is the dramatic interest of the book; its beauty lies in its magnificent descriptions of the tropics; the language of Graça Aranha is full of harmonious poetry. Angel de Estrada is one of the most cultivated spirits of America. Traveller (is not one of his books entitled _Ame Nomade_?), novelist, and poet, he distils in his books the quintessence of long meditation and infinite reading. His novel _Redención_ is the work of a humanist; civilisations, arts, beliefs, all pass before us, evoked by the hand of a master. A subtle and rich vocabulary serves him to give life to his ideas and resuscitate the life of dead cities. [Illustration: RICARDO ROJAS (ARGENTINA). Contemporary poet and essayist. To face p. 268.] {269} Enrique Rodriguez Larreta has described in his novel _La Gloria de don Ramiro_ the period of Philip II., bloody, austere, and tyrannical. No American artist has his verbal wealth, his power of evocation, and his meticulous scholarship and genius for reconstruction. This patient and harmonious piece of work surprises us in a literature full of improvisations like that of South America. _La Raza de Cain_, by Reyles, is a remarkable romance, in which the author shows us the superman, Nietzsche's man of prey, at grips with the weak and the vanquished; he exalts, in language full of eloquence, the Dionysiac joy of life and domination.