Over the last two years New Left Review has published a number of accounts—fictional and documentary—aiming to give the quality of life in an under-developed country: for instance Antonio Ferres’s story ‘Land of Olives’ (nlr 29) and Jan Myrdal’s description of life in a Chinese village (nlr 30). At the same time we have, with this number, published ten accounts by people in this country of what their work consists of and what it means to them. As a complement to this side of nlr’s interests we are happy to publish for the first time Oscar Lewis’s account of ‘A Thursday with Manuel’.
In 1961 The Children of Sánchez was published in the United States and in this country in 1962. The work of an American anthropologist, it consisted of the tape-recorded accounts of the lives of a family living in a slum in Mexico City. Five members of the Sánchez family recalled their lives as individuals and as members of a family. In a scrupulous and brilliant feat of interviewing, translation and presentation Lewis managed to produce a complex, moving history of a family and of a social situation, and disclosed a culture of poverty largely ignored by novels and novelists rooted in the middle class.