Dona Barbara Prologo y Notas de Mariano Picon Salas JMc

Mexico City: Editorial Orion, 1974. Paperback. In quite good condition.. Octavo, [18cm/7.25inches], paperbound with pictorial covers, pp. 432. Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. Rómulo Ángel del Monte Carmelo Gallegos Freire (1884 – 1969) was a Venezuelan novelist and politician. For a period of some nine months during 1948, he was the first cleanly elected president in his country's history. He began his work as a schoolteacher, writer, classical music enthusiast, and journalist in 1903. His novel Doña Bárbara was first published in 1929, and it was because of the book's criticisms of the regime of longtime dictator Juan Vicente Gómez that he was forced to flee the country. He took refuge in Spain, where he continued to write: his acclaimed novels Cantaclaro (1934) and Canaima (1935) date from this period. He returned to Venezuela in 1936 and was appointed Minister of Public Education. In 1937 he was elected to Congress and, in 1940–41, served as Mayor of Caracas. In 1945, Rómulo Gallegos was involved in the coup d'état that brought Rómulo Betancourt and the "Revolutionary Government Junta" to power, in the period known as El Trienio Adeco. In the 1947 general election he ran for the presidency of the republic as the Acción Democrática candidate and won in what is generally believed to be the country's first honest election because its universal, direct and secret character. He was noted for raising the state's tax revenue for oil profits increase from 43% to 50%, a tax scheme known as "fifty / fifty" and which was subsequently replicated in several producing countries as Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless army officers Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Luis Felipe Llovera Páez, threw him out of power November in the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état. He took refuge first in Cuba and then in Mexico. Gallegos returned to his country after the fall of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958, but he would no longer be engaged in politics.