José de la Cuadra

Born 1903 or 1904 in Guayaquil; died there February 1941. Ecuadorian writer.

Cuadra first appeared in print in 1923 and later joined the School of Guayaquil (E. Gil Gilbert and others), whose slogan was “exposure and protest.” His collections of stories Love Asleep (1930) and Mad Monkeys (1951, published posthumously) and his socioethnographic essay ‘The Ecuador Montuvio” (1937) depict the cruel exploitation of peasants of the coastal tropical zone. The novel The Sangurim Family (1934) describes the sociopsychological factors underlying the acquisition of wealth by a peasant family. Cuadro’s works, combining documentary qualities with artistic originality, played an important role in the development of literary realism in Ecuador.