SOURCE: Luckey, Robert E. “Mariano Azuela: 1873-1952.” World Literature Today 27, no. 4 (autumn 1953): 368-70.

In the following essay, Luckey provides a brief overview of Azuela's life and works.

When Dr. Mariano Azuela died in Mexico City on March 1, 1952, Spanish America lost one of its most considerable novelists of this century. Dr. Azuela is the author of a universally recognized masterpiece, Los de abajo, which has probably been more widely read both in translation and in the original than any other Spanish American work of our time; he is responsible for the growth of an entirely new sub-genre in literature, the novel of the Mexican Revolution; and he has left, in some twenty novels, the most revealing profile in existence of the common people of Mexico in his time.

Los de abajo is simply a heartfelt story of the sweep of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 across the lives of the...