Initialed notices were written by Roger Abrahams, Carolyn Boyd, Henry Dietz, Jane Gamer, Don Gibbs, Edward Glab, Lawrence Graham, Frank Halla, Doris M. Ladd, Standish Meacham, Américo Paredes, Gilberto Ramírez, Russell P. Scott, Richard Symanski, Mark Szuchman, and Nancy P. Troike, all of the University of Texas, Austin.
With the recording of Venezuelan poet Andrés Eloy Blanco in 1943, the Library of Congress embarked upon a program of capturing on magnetic tape the voices of contemporary Hispanic writers. As the number of recordings increased, the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape was created. Located in the Latin American, Portuguese, and Spanish Division of the Library of Congress, the Archive consists of some 350 reels of tape containing the words of 232 writers from 22 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula. Although the preponderance of the writers are literary, such historians as Jorge Basadre, Daniel Cosío Villegas, and Francisco Antonio Encinas are included.
The descriptive Guide to the Archive permits access to about 10, 000 individual poems, selections from novels, short stories, essays, and other accounts preserved in it. The Guide is arranged alphabetically by the author’s surname, the pseudonym being chosen sometimes over the real name. Entries for each author include birth and death dates, country of origin, genre, language, place, date, approximate time length, and location symbol within the Archive of the recording; also included are an enumeration of the material recorded, biographical sketch, commentary on the author’s writings, and a selective bibliography of the author’s works, including translations. The Guide concludes with an Index to Authors by countries.
