128

(1910 to 1970)

Dr. Irving Leonard Papers and Library, Latin American History and Literature [Rare Book - Manuscript - Spanish - Mexico]

Group of material from the personal papers and library of Irving A. Leonard (1896-1996), American historian and author specializing in Latin American culture, comprising dozens of handwritten and typescript letters exchanged with leading scholars of Latin American history, literature, and culture. Correspondents include Alfonso Reyes (Mexican writer, diplomat, and literary critic); Paul Dudley White (American cardiologist); Clarence H. Haring (Harvard historian of Latin America); Enrique Anderson Imbert (Argentine literary critic and scholar); Germán Arciniegas (Colombian historian, essayist, and diplomat); George Rippey Stewart, Jr. (American historian and novelist); Salvador de Madariaga (Spanish diplomat, historian, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee); James Truslow Adams (American historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning author); Stanley T. Williams (American literary scholar and biographer); Ricardo Rojas (Argentine writer, historian, and cultural figure); and others, with occasional calling cards and notes and studio photographs of Leonard.

Together with 14 volumes from Leonard's personal library, including leather-bound presentation copies of his own works: Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century (Berkeley, 1929), two copies; Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Indies (Berkeley, 1933); Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (Cambridge, 1949); and Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places, and Practices (Ann Arbor, 1959), including copies inscribed by Leonard. Additional volumes by related authors include Francisco Rodríguez Marín's El Quijote: Don Quijote en America (Madrid,1911); Manuel Gálvez's La Maestra Normal (Buenos Aires: Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial Limitada, 1914), inscribed to Leonard; Benito Pérez Galdós's Los Ayacuchos (Madrid, 1916); José Rojas Garcidueñas's Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (Mexico, 1945); and Benito Lynch's El Inglés de Los Güesos (Buenos Aires, 1924).

Irving Albert Leonard was a pioneering scholar of colonial Latin American intellectual and cultural history. His work, particularly Books of the Brave (1949), remains a foundational study of the transmission of literary culture to Spain's New World, and helped establish the field of Hispanic American cultural history in the United States.

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