by Ramón Sender

Ramón Sender was born in 1901 to a country at a crossroads. Three years earlier, Spain had suffered a humiliating defeat to the United States in the Spanish-American War, and a debate raged among Spanish intellectuals and politicians about how their country could become a modern state, able to compete with the developed nations of the world. As Sender became a young man, the debate began to focus on a few key domestic issues, among them land reform and the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state. Sender’s childhood was spent in small villages in the rural province of Aragon, yet these national issues were quite relevant to his own life. He witnessed the injustices suffered by Aragon’s landless peasants, later expressing his concern for these injustices in his journalism and fiction. Sender...