30 Facts About Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes Macias was a Mexican novelist and essayist.

Carlos Fuentes was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.

Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Berta Macias and Rafael Carlos Fuentes, the latter of whom was a Mexican diplomat.

From 1934 to 1940, Fuentes' father was posted to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, DC, where Carlos attended English-language school, eventually becoming fluent.

Carlos Fuentes began to write during this time, creating his own magazine, which he shared with apartments on his block.

In 1940, the Carlos Fuentes family was transferred to Santiago, Chile.

Carlos Fuentes lived in Mexico for the first time at the age of 16, when he went to study law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City with an eye toward a diplomatic career.

Carlos Fuentes later attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

In 1957, Carlos Fuentes was named head of cultural relations at the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs.

Carlos Fuentes served as Mexico's ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977, resigning in protest of former President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz's appointment as ambassador to Spain.

Carlos Fuentes taught at Cambridge, Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, and Cornell.

Carlos Fuentes's friends included Luis Bunuel, William Styron, Friedrich Durrenmatt, and sociologist C Wright Mills, to whom he dedicated his book The Death of Artemio Cruz.

Once good friends with Nobel-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes became estranged from him in the 1980s in a disagreement over the Sandinistas, whom Carlos Fuentes supported.

In 1989, he was the subject of a full-length PBS television documentary, "Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes," which aired in Europe and was broadcast repeatedly in Mexico.

Carlos Fuentes fathered three children, only one of whom survived him: Cecilia Carlos Fuentes Macedo, born in 1962.

Carlos Fuentes himself cited Miguel de Cervantes, William Faulkner and Balzac as the most important writers to him.

Carlos Fuentes named Latin American writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti, Miguel Angel Asturias and Jorge Luis Borges.

European modernists James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust has been cited as important influences on his writing, with Carlos Fuentes applying the influence from them on his main theme; Mexican history and identity.

Carlos Fuentes described himself as a pre-modern writer, using only pens, ink and paper.

Carlos Fuentes' first novel, Where the Air Is Clear, was an immediate success on its publication in 1958.

Carlos Fuentes was regarded as a leading figure of the Latin American boom in the 1960s and 1970s along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar.

Carlos Fuentes's 1994 book Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone is an autobiograpichal novel that portrays the actress Jean Seberg who Fuentes had a love affair with in the 1960s.

In 1999 Carlos Fuentes published the novel The Years With Laura Diaz.

Carlos Fuentes's writing include several collections of stories, essays and plays.

Carlos Fuentes remained prolific to the end of his life, with an essay on the new government of France appearing in Reforma newspaper on the day of his death.

Carlos Fuentes was a long-standing critic of the Institutional Revolutionary Party government that ruled Mexico between 1929 and the election of Vicente Fox in 2000, and later of Mexico's inability to reduce drug violence.

Carlos Fuentes has expressed his sympathies with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas.

Carlos Fuentes's politics caused him to be blocked from entering the United States until a Congressional intervention in 1967.

On May 15,2012, Carlos Fuentes died in Angeles del Pedregal hospital in southern Mexico City from a massive hemorrhage.

Carlos Fuentes had been brought there after his doctor had found him collapsed in his Mexico City home.