The Decade the World Discovered Latin American Fiction

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Before the 1960s, a reader in Paris or New York was unlikely to have encountered a contemporary Latin American novelist. The Boom changed that in the span of one decade. Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, published in Argentina in 1963, offered 155 chapters that could be read in more than one order, an experiment that announced the group's formal ambitions. Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz, also 1962, pioneered its own narrative innovations in tracing a dying man's life backward through Mexican history. Mario Vargas Llosa, writing from Peru, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Colombia, joined Cortazar and Fuentes as the movement's four central figures, their books translated, reviewed and read across Europe as a group in a way no earlier generation of Latin American writers had been. It was Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude that became the Boom's best known achievement, and the book most responsible for carrying magical realism, the blending of the fantastical into ordinary narrated fact, into international vogue; Garcia Marquez went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and Vargas Llosa followed in 2010.