The years 1930 to 1950 were a period of considerable activity in the Argentine novel, in great part as a reaction and response to the military coup of September 1930 that inaugurated what has come to be known as the Infamous Decade of Argentine social history. In this work, David Foster offers a reassessment of social realism in the Argentine literature of the time.

The writers considered include Berbardo, Kordon, Leonidas, Barletta, Jose Rabinovich, Bernardo Verbitsky, Max Dickmann, Elias Castelnuovo, and Alvaro Junque. The focus of the study is an examination of the elements of narrative strategy that make the works of these writers of particular interest within the context of contemporary postmodernist writing, especially as regards documentary and mixed-generic texts.