This study chronicles the lives of the white-collar workers of the capital cities of two nations, Argentina and Uruguay, through the greater part of the twentieth century: that is to say, during the post-pen, pre-informatic age. In the office, it was the era of the filing cabinet, the rows of desks, the mechanical adding machine and the telephone. Most importantly, in the office itself, and in the narrative that reflects it, this was the era of the typewriter.

The present study has no pretensions as a work of social science (although it draws on sociological and historical works), but rather is conceived as a narrative of cultural history; moreover, it is one that emerges through the work of a very particular group of people: creative writers who also experienced the ordinary life of the office. Poised between the creative and the routine, our writers reflect – and reflect on – the fundamental conflict between individual autonomy and the need to survive within the system. For these people the nature of that system is, obviously, broadly speaking bureaucratic.

Through the decades the writers respond in different ways to this fundamental conflict. Some address specific economic and political circumstances, while others internalise the bureaucratic present and extrapolate it into a nightmarish future. On the other hand, some seem curiously untouched by bureaucratic routine, but are more interested in, for example, the city; yet others transform office routine into baroque extravagance. One of the underlying realities that inform these varied responses is, of course, the duration of service in an office, and the type of office: a working life processing files inside a bank or a state bureaucracy self-evidently is very different from writing newspaper articles or editing journals.

One of the most combative and acute writers in the River Plate in the twentieth century was the Argentine Roberto Arlt (1900–42), who in the prologue to his third novel, Los lanzallamas, launches a call to arms. Referring to his fatigue after what were in fact creative hours at the typewriter, he nevertheless seems to draw his work towards the common white-collar experience, that of his readers. He does so to challenge and give heart to his readers; his message is that the machinery of everyday routine can be harnessed to other ends: ‘El porvenir es triunfalmente nuestro.