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Luis Alberto Sanchez
Latin American Literature Collection

Dr. Luis Alberto Sanchez (1900-1994) was a Peruvian politician, author, and founding member of the left-leaning American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) party. In addition, he was a leading authority on American and Latin American literature. His academic career included years as a professor, and later as a rector, at Universidad de San Marcos, Peru; he also taught at the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University, colleges in Florida and Oklahoma, the Sorbonne in Paris, and universities in Madrid and Jerusalem. Dr. Donald C. Henderson and Grace P. Perez translated and compiled Sanchez's correspondence in Literature and Politics in Latin America: An Annotated Calendar of the Luis Alberto Sanchez Correspondence, 1919-1980 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries, 1982).

The Luis Alberto Sanchez Collection forms an integral part of the holdings of the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, which has been collecting materials that deal with the literature of Central and South America since the 1930s. Sanchez's library, which includes many extremely rare works of literary authors published by small presses, was purchased by the Penn State Libraries in 1969. The subjects range from history and politics to Latin American criticism, poetry, and theater. Imprint dates of the literary works range from 1890 to the 1960s, with a majority of them being published in the 1920s through the 1950s. In a study made to determine their uniqueness among research libraries in North America, only thirty percent of the titles were reported held in other libraries in the United States and Canada. The rarest of the Sanchez books are shelved in the Rare Books Room; the Sanchez Papers are housed in Historical Collections and Labor Archives.

The great importance of this literature collection lies not so much in the value of each individual item, but in the fact that, together, the volumes reflect much of the conventional thought and wisdom of those who lived and published in Latin America and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The collection is a reflection of literary styles and ideas captured at a particular point in time, and, from the standpoint of scholarly research, it supports the active Spanish and Latin American Studies programs at The Pennsylvania State University.

In 1996, the University Libraries received a CIC coordinated microfilming project grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to microfilm 600 volumes (590 titles) from the literature collection; all the titles filmed are cataloged under the series "Alberto Luis Sanchez Latin American Literature Collection on Microform." Between October 1998 and September 2000, a second CIC coordinated microfilming grant project microfilmed 461 volumes from the Luis Alberto Sanchez Political Science and History Collection.

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