by Miguel Angel Asturias

Miguel Angel Asturias was born in Guatemala City in 1899. No stranger to oppression, Asturias lived much of his life abroad in order to avoid political persecution at home. During his stay in Paris in the 1920s, he studied surrealism and, under the tutelage of Professor Georges Reynaud, translated the Popol Vuh, a sacred book of the Maya Indians of Guatemala. Asturias’s first novel, El Señor Presidente (1946), explored political corruption and discontent in Guatemala—subjects that would reappear in many of his later works, including the “Banana Trilogy,” a fiercely polemical exposé of the United Fruit Company that included the novels Viento fuerte (1949; Strong Wind), El Papa verde (1954; The Green Pope), and Los ojos de los enterrados (1960, The Eyes of the Interred). Although his popularity never rivaled that of later Latin American authors, in 1967 Asturias became the first Latin...