University in the Americas. Harvard, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1636, is the oldest university in the United States. Both represent the oldest universities in South America and North America, from which the University of Puerto Rico aspires to inherit its centuries-old educational traditions. The Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a United States agency, recorded a documentary on Lima in 1944 that included a visit to the University of San Marcos, then located in the Casona. In the recording you can see the old admission process consisting of an oral exam; One of the teachers and evaluators registered in the documentary is the historian and diplomat from San Marcos Raúl Porras Barrenechea. During World War II, the Peruvian and San Marcos doctor Ernesto Pinto-Bazurco living in Germany came to suffer persecution by the Gestapo, eventually being imprisoned in the Laufen castle in 1942. Years later, when he was released, he assumed the position of Consul of Peru in Germany, which allowed him to issue documentation and passports that helped several Jews to escape the Holocaust promoted by the Nazi regime. In 1948 he returns to Peru, where he resumes his medical profession. He passed away on May 19, 2014. Laufen Castle, where he was imprisoned, now has a memorial plaque in his honor. The short novel The lurker at the threshold, started by the American horror and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft and finished in 1945 by August Derleth —a writer belonging to the Circle of Lovecraft— mentions the University of San Marcos as one of the locations where fragments of the mythical Necronomicon, a fictional magical book from the Lovecraftian universe, are kept. The other locations for fragments of the grimoire are the British Museum, the National Library of France, Harvard University, the University of Buenos Aires and the non-existent Miskatonic University. The novel Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, has Santiago Zavala as its protagonist, who narrates various events of his life through the novel, one of which is his time at the University of San Marcos during the government of Manuel Odría. Luis Abanto Morales, Peruvian singer and composer of folk songs, composed a marinera titled San Marcos, in honor of the four-hundred-year-old university. In the novel The Storyteller (1987), by the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, both the first narrator and Saúl Zuratas, a character who develops a deep appreciation and