Ante la silla eléctrica

On August 23, 1927, anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair after one of the most famous, dramatic and controversial trials in American judicial history. They were two Italian immigrants who had been arrested in the midst of an anti-communist frenzy, tried and convicted in a hearing in which the impartiality of the jury and the judge was, to say the least, doubtful. A few months before the execution, John Dos Passos, who had just established himself as a writer with the publication of Manhattan Transfer, was completing the accelerated and feverish writing of Before the Electric Chair, his account of the Sacco and Vanzetti court case. At that time, it was still allowed to hope that the citizen protest would manage to prevent compliance with the sentence. This important work, unpublished to date in Spanish, is undoubtedly an exciting text, whose interest is both...