Lorenzo García Vega Papers, 1969-2008 at Princeton University Library

Lorenzo García Vega was born in 1926 in Jagüey Grande, in the province of Matanzas, Cuba.  A poet living in exile since the late 1960s, García Vega is best known for his involvement in the literary group Orígenes.  Over his lifetime, he has published nearly two dozen works of poetry and prose, and in 1952 won Cuba’s Premio Nacional de Literatura.  García Vega became a polemical figure with the publication of Los años de Orígenes (1978), a book that offered an alternate view of the famed literary group than the one traditionally held by the Cuban reading public.  Reviled for his representation of José Lezama Lima, the group’s founder, García Vega has since suffered a kind of double exile:  the first from Cuba, and the second from the Cuban literary and intellectual milieu to which he formerly belonged.  Despite this, writers such as Antonio José Ponte and Victor Fowler celebrate García Vega’s work, abundant with repetition and often fragmented or elliptical, for its innovation and literary radicalism.

Prominent within the Lorenzo García Vega Papers are twenty-nine notebooks in which García Vega recorded daily diary entries, ideas, drafts of poems, stories and correspondence, fragments of poems and stories, recollections of dreams, quotations, and responses to literature and art.  The correspondence in the collection includes letters received by García Vega, dating from 1969 until 1996, though undated letters from Héctor Libertella regarding the manuscript of Devastación del Hotel San Luis (2007) may date into the 2000s.  Most notable are multiple letters from Guido Llinás, Octavio Paz, and Manuel Díaz Martínez.

For a complete list of archives and correspondence by Latin American writers and intellectuals at the Princeton University Library, and links to finding aids, please go to http://firestone.princeton.edu/latinam/literarymss.php.