The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution

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New American Library, 1963 - Fiction - 151 pages
"Ten years after its publication in a small El Paso paper, The Underdogs achieved world-wide renown as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution. It is the story of Demetrio Macías, a naïve, peace-loving Indian, who is forced to side with the rebels to save his family. In the course of battle, he becomes a compulsive militarist whose courage, almost despite himself, leads to a generalship in Villa's army. But as the Cause suffers defeat after defeat, Macías loses prestige and moral purpose at the hands of turncoats, camp followers, and the peasants who had once loved him. Carleton Beals wrote of this novel, "The scenes have the brutality of Gorky. Azuela is the Mexican Chekhov only in so much as he is a doctor; in all else he is close to Gorky, with a touch of Gorky's terrific pessimism, but none of Gorky's revolutionary optimism."" --

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Contents

Section 1
14
Section 2
18
Section 3
36
Copyright

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About the author (1963)

Mariano Azuela is a Mexican writer born in 1873. After receiving a degree in medicine, he returned to poor districts in his home state to practice madicine, a manifestation of his lifelong concern for the pueblo of Mexico. During the Mexican Revolution, Azuela joined the forces of Francisco Villa and became director of public education in Jalisco under the Villa government. When that government fell, he served as doctor to Villa's men during their retreat northward. From Azuela's war experiences came his novel The Underdogs, which he published in installments in a newspaper after fleeing to Texas in 1915. The novel Torres-Rioseco which has been called an epic poem in prose of the Mexican Revolution deals with the revolution from the point of view of the humble soldiers, examining the circumstances that keep them in poverty, the brutality of the fighting, and the opportunism and betrayal of the revolution. An admirer of Emile Zola, Azuela stressed the effect of environment on character in many of his novels.

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