First edition, scarce, Güiraldes’s first novel, a tale of gaucho life inspired by his experiences as a boy on the family ranch; inscribed ‘Para Mlle Matilda Pomès / Ricardo Güiraldes’.

The prominent Argentinian novelist and poet Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927) was raised partly in Europe, with French his first language, and was to return to Paris in the 1920s. Raucho was preceded by a collection of stories and a volume of poems, but he reached greatest prominence with his second gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra (1926). In 1924, he founded the short-lived periodical Proa along with Borges.

The hispanophile French poet, translator and academic Mathilde Pomès (1886–1977) published several collections of verse in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s, mixing in the same circle as Güiraldes around the Librairie Monnier, along with Larbaud, Reyes, and Salinas.