Eugene O'Neill reached the port of Buenos Aires by the end of May 1910. He was just entering his twenties and possibly running away from a problematic family which would later become the core of some of his main dramatic creations. O'Neill went onboard the Charles Racine and sailed down to Buenos Aires, without knowing that once there he would find and experience different aspects of hell: the impossible love for a prostitute, hunger and loneliness. A year later, he sailed back to his native land taking with him an incipient TB and a poem he never published: Ashes of Orchids. Paolantonio uses the title Ashes of Orchids to name this novel which tells us about Eugene O'Neill's stay in Buenos Aires. Biographic information, thorough research and a well balanced amount of fiction merge in this novel where verisimilitude is significant and absolutely revealing. A provincial matron, an outcast English captain, the mulatto owner of a brothel and her five pupils revolve about Gene (O'Neill), the young sailor who gets to Buenos Aires - the 'Queen of the River Plate' - in the fall of 1910. An eventful plot unfolds in the city capital of Argentina - at those times a town with a magnetic attraction for both pauperized immigrants and unscrupulous adventurers.