Literary Writers of Latin America

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

 Borges was a precocious writer. He published his first work, a translation of Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince,"
at age 7. However, Jorge Luis Borges, the classic writer, did not surface until his late thirties. Always afflicted
with poor eyesight, Borges fell down a staircase and sustained a severe head injury. It was during his recovery
that he turned his attention to his writing abilities, and in an attempt to prove he could still, or at all, write, he
began a story which was to become "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

 Borges was a learned reader, sometimes startlingly so. He first read Don Quixote in an English translation; he
admired Walt Whitman; and he was drawn to the many classical writers of England, North America, and Europe.
He had a taste for Poe, and especially Kafka, whom he deliberately emulated. His short stories frequently present
his reader with a dizzying array of libraries, labyrinths, and mirrors. Ana Maria Barrenchea, in an expertly brief
description of Borges, said that he "is an admirable writer pledged to destroy reality and convert man into a
shadow.”

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980)

 Alejo Carpentier’s great stylistic contribution to Latin American literature was his magical realism, called lo real
maravilloso, which reflects the fantastic, and often otherworldly, properties of Latin American life. As the likes
of García Márquez and Neruda have expressed (see below), their real-life world of revolution and upheaval has
created an audience that embraces the extreme as never too far from the truth..

 Carpentier was musically inclined and was drawn to Afro-Cuban culture. His novel The Kingdom of this
World depicts the Haitian uprising in which African slaves rebel against their French colonial rulers. Carpentier’s
work not only provided the Boom authors with stylistic inspiration, but his life of exile and arrests offered a
model for the Latin American artist’s dedicated political activism

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

 Few Latin American authors have had the luxury to ignore politics. Neruda was an outspoken voice in Latin
American world politics, a move which allowed him, in some ways, to alienate everyone. He controversially
favored Joseph Stalin and had his library ransacked and desecrated by the ruling Chilean regime. He depended on
the kindness of supporters across Latin America to escape. Talk to any of his devoted readers, and you’re sure to
find something about his politics that they both admire and condemn.

 García Márquez called Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” His poetry is famously
romantic and erotic, sometimes importing sensuality to the most quotidian of objects, as seen in works like “Ode
to the Apple.” His creativity also flourished when he worked within surrealism and political thought.
Neruda’s Canto General is an epic catalog of the Latin American world, and it presents sweeping histories and
botanical and zoological accounts of the continent. Pablo Neruda explained much about Canto General,
surrealism, and the work of Carpentier and García Márquez, when speaking of the magical quality of Latin
American life. He said in an interview, “You see there are in our countries rivers which have no names, trees
which nobody knows, and birds which nobody has described. It is easier for us to be surrealistic because
everything we know is new.”

 Neruda’s politics made him an exile from his native Chile, and he recounted his dramatic escape in his Nobel
lecture.

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)

 Gabriel García Márquez might be the most famous of Latin American authors. Affectionately called “Gabo”
throughout the Spanish-speaking world, García Márquez took the magical insights of Carpentier a step further.
 The fiction of lo real maravilloso entrenched itself in the extremity of Latin American life, but still kept itself
within the realms of the real. García Márquez’s magical realist world blends beautifully the magically quotidian
(ice, magnets) with everyday magic (divine ascensions, raining flowers). The neglected becomes
celebrated and García Márquez ferries his reader through a world of the most fabulous distortions. With novels
like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez has achieved the great
literary triumph of helping his readers see the world anew.

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)

 Gabriela Mistral’s life was in many ways dedicated to teaching, although she was an autodidact whose formal
education ended around age twelve. She taught in Chile’s growing national school system, advocated for
accessible schooling around the world, and was a professor at colleges like Barnard and Vassar. Her poetry
captures not only the wide political themes of Latin Americanidentity and progress, but also the intimate spheres
of loss, grief, and motherhood. She remains the only female Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize.

Octavio Paz (1914-1998)

 Like many others in this article, Paz led a political life. He was a Mexican ambassador until 1968, when student
demonstrators were killed by the nation’s military and police force in the Tlateloco massacre. He also wrote and
spoke out frequently against the regimes of Stalin and Castro. His poetry, for which he won the 1990 Nobel Prize,
often explores solitude and sensuality as well as language and silence.

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012)

 Carlos Fuentes taught at many United States universities. Fuentes was very politically involved and held political
positions while continuing to write. He was the Mexican ambassador to France for about two years before
resigning in protest of the appointment of a rival. His opinions, such as his support for a Nicaraguan political
party, estranged him from another writer-diplomat, Octavio Paz. The FBI closely monitored him and worked to
deter his visa applications in the 1960s. His books reflect a constant political striving, interrogating the ideals of
revolution, power, equality, justice, and violence. Fuentes’ fiction, like his most famous work, The Death of
Artemio Cruz, happily utilizes the tools of multiple narration and interior monologue.

Isabel Allende (b. 1947)

 Allende, a post-Boom author, follows in the tradition of her predecessors. Her novels frequently blend myth and
reality. She draws from the fount of magical realism that has long helped capture the Latin American experience.

 Allende began her career in television and journalism and working on the editorial staff of magazines. As a
reporter, she was able to get an interview with Pablo Neruda, who told her that she had too much imagination for
a journalist. He suggested that she begin writing novels instead. As a result, her literary career has a semi-
accidental nature. If it wasn’t for outside encouragement, and a letter to her dying grandfather (that developed
into The House of the Spirits, her first book), who knows how long her career would have been delayed. Today,
she is regarded as a Latin American treasure and figure of world culture. She has appeared in Olympic
ceremonies, won Chile’s National Literature Prize, and won a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

-Group 2 (LATIN AMERICA)