In his 42 years of life, Roberto Arlt was witness to one and a half world wars, a successful Communist revolution, and various failed attempts; he saw the most important crisis to hit the capitalist system and understood the ferocity of the Holocaust. But most important, perhaps, is that Arlt formed part of the generation that first faced the downfall of the notion of infinite progress and of unrestricted innovation, confronting these facts along with the brutal violence that marked the early 20th century. Arlt s poetics of disenchantment and disillusion are the most distinctive aspects of his stories and etchings, perhaps the works that best represent the period."