Surveillance, the Cold War, and Latin American Literature examines secret police reports on Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Elena Poniatowska, José Revueltas, Otto René Castillo, Carlos Cerda, and other writers, from archives in Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, the German Democratic Republic, and the USA. Combining literary and cultural analysis, history, philosophy, and history of art, it establishes a critical dialogue between the spies' surveillance and the writers' novels, short stories, and poems, and presents a new take on Latin American modernity, tracing the trajectory of a modern gaze from the Italian Renaissance to the Cold War. It traces the origins of today's surveillance society with sense of urgency and consequence that should appeal to academic and non-academic readers alike throughout the Americas, Europe and beyond.