Carlos Fuentes

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Lore & Background

Fuentes was born in Panama City to a Mexican diplomat father. He spent his childhood in various Latin American capitals, later describing this as giving him the ability to view Latin America as a critical outsider. From 1934 to 1940 he lived in Washington, D.C., where he became fluent in English and began writing, creating his own magazine which he shared with apartments on his block. In 1938, Mexico's nationalization of foreign oil holdings led to a national outcry in the U.S.; he later pointed to the event as the moment he began to understand himself as Mexican. The family moved to Santiago, Chile in 1940, where he first became interested in socialism, partly through the poetry of Pablo Neruda. He lived in Mexico for the first time at age 16 to study law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City with an eye toward a diplomatic career, also working at the daily newspaper Hoy and writing short stories. He later attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. In 1957, Fuentes was named head of cultural relations at the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. His 1958 novel Where the Air Is Clear made him a national celebrity and allowed him to leave his diplomatic post to write full-time. He moved to Havana in 1959 after the Cuban Revolution, writing pro-Castro articles and essays. He married Mexican actress Rita Macedo that year. Considered dashingly handsome, Fuentes also had high-profile affairs with actresses Jeanne Moreau and Jean Seberg, who inspired his novel Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone. His second marriage, to journalist Silvia Lemus, lasted until his death. He served as Mexico's ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977, resigning in protest of former President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz's appointment as ambassador to Spain. He taught at Cambridge, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Cornell. His friends included Luis Buñuel, William Styron, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and sociologist C. Wright Mills, to whom he dedicated The Death of Artemio Cruz. Once good friends with Nobel-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Fuentes became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over the Sandinistas, whom Fuentes supported. In 1988, Paz's magazine Vuelta carried an attack by Enrique Krauze on the legitimacy of Fuentes' Mexican identity, opening a feud that lasted until Paz's 1998 death. In 1989, he was the subject of a full-length PBS television documentary, 'Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes,' which also aired in Europe and was broadcast repeatedly in Mexico.

Reader's Guide

Carlos Fuentes was a central figure of the Latin American Boom in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar. His novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) is widely regarded as a seminal work of modern Spanish American literature, using rotating narrators and cinematic techniques influenced by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane—including close-up, cross-cutting, deep focus, and flashback—to explore the corrupting effects of power and the distortion of revolutionary ideals. His 1975 novel Terra Nostra, a massive, Byzantine work telling the story of all Hispanic civilization, won the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1976 and the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1977. The Old Gringo (1985), loosely based on American author Ambrose Bierce's disappearance during the Mexican Revolution, became the first U.S. bestseller written by a Mexican author. Fuentes received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor (1999). He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won. His writing focused on Mexican history and identity, influenced by Miguel de Cervantes, William Faulkner, and Balzac, as well as European modernists James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Fuentes described himself as a pre-modern writer, using only pens, ink and paper, asking, 'Do words need anything else?'

Did You Know?

• Fuentes was born in Panama City, not Mexico, because his father was a Mexican diplomat stationed there.
• He began writing at age 6–12 in Washington, D.C., creating his own magazine that he shared with apartments on his block.
• Fuentes dedicated his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz to sociologist C. Wright Mills.
• His novel The Old Gringo (1985) was the first U.S. bestseller written by a Mexican author.
• Fuentes fathered three children, but only one—Cecilia Fuentes Macedo—survived him; his son Carlos died from hemophilia complications at 25, and his daughter Natasha died of an apparent drug overdose at 30.