Arturo Uslar Pietri and his publishers

Abstract

In the House of Study of Venezuelan History: Lorenzo A. Mendoza Quintero, the correspondence file of Arturo Uslar Pietri is found. In this paper we will analyze, out of that big amount of letters, only those which are related to his publishers. These letters have been dated between 1946 and 1984, times in which Arturo Uslar Pietri held contact with the publishing houses for the publication of his works. A great quantity of these letters comes from the box No. 060,001 to 060,044, folder 060,011 which is titled "Losada Editorial", others come from his epistolary with important characters of the publishing world, such as Guillermo De Torre: and Carmen Ballcells, but also with authors who published together with him and shared the experiences of this process, like Miguel Angel Asturias and Luis Beltran Guerrero. Our objective with this research is to communicate the importance ihat the book market has for the diffusion of the works of the Latin American authors, and we have taken the concrete case of Arturo Uslar Pietri because we have the necessary documentation to make an analysis of part de this trajectory. This, sometimes, is not possible with other authors, since the required records to make a study with this subject matter were not kept. The conclusion that we came to, is that even though we are talking about an author with great national and international intellectual prestige , he struggled with his publishing houses, which were generally not punctual when it came to the payment of his work. Nonetheless, we also heard the voices of the publishers, such as Gonzalo Losada:, through whom we observed that the work of the publishing houses of Latin America is not safe from the legal and economic risks which will be presented in this work.