Victoria Ocampo: Against the Wind and the Tide (Texas Pan American Series)

The first lady of Argentine letters, Victoria Ocampo is best known as the architect of cultural bridges between the American and European continents and as the founder and director of Sur, an influential South American literary review and publishing house.In this first biographical study in English of la superbe Argentine, originally published in 1979, Doris Meyer considers Victoria Ocampos role in introducing European and North American writers and artists to the South American publicthrough the pages of her review, through translations of their work, and through lecture tours and recitations. She examines Ocampos personal relationships with some of the most illustrious writers and thinkers of this centuryincluding Jos Ortega y Gasset, Rabindranath Tagore, Count Hermann Keyserling, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Monnier, Vita SackvilleWest, Gabriela Mistral, and many others. And she portrays an extraordinary woman who rebelled against the strictures of family and social class to become a leading personality in the fight for womens rights in Argentina and, later, a steadfast opponent of the Pern regime, for which she was sent to jail in 1953.Fifteen of Victoria Ocampos essays, selected from her more than ten volumes of prose and translated by Doris Meyer, complement the biographical study.