A Novel Burned by Its Own Subjects

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

Mario Vargas Llosa's first novel, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963), drew directly on his own adolescence as a cadet at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, portraying the school's brutality and corruption with enough specificity that the real academy's officers organized a public burning of a thousand copies of the book on the school grounds. The controversy drew international press attention to the young Peruvian writer and, alongside Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Carlos Fuentes, helped establish the Latin American Boom as a literary phenomenon foreign publishers and readers began actively seeking out.