Carlos Fuentes

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

Carlos Fuentes's 1962 novel The Death of Artemio Cruz narrates the last day in the life of a dying newspaper magnate and former revolutionary through three alternating narrative voices, a first person present tense, a second person future tense addressed to the dying man himself, and a third person past tense recounting episodes from his life out of chronological order. The fractured structure lets the novel expose the gap between the idealistic young revolutionary Cruz had once been and the corrupt oligarch he became, using Cruz's single life as a lens on the broader betrayal Fuentes saw in the Mexican Revolution's aftermath.

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

Though born in Panama City to a Mexican diplomat father and raised partly abroad in Washington, D.C., Buenos Aires and elsewhere, Carlos Fuentes made Mexican national identity and history his central and recurring subject across a career of more than twenty novels. Works spanning from Where the Air Is Clear (1958) through Terra Nostra (1975) and beyond examined Mexico's indigenous, colonial and revolutionary past in relation to its unsettled twentieth century present, and Fuentes was also an influential essayist and diplomat, serving as Mexico's ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977.