Update: Carlos Fuentes passed away in May 2012. Here’s his obituary from The New York Times and a remembrance from his friends Alberto Manguel and Liz Calder in The Guardian.
Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s best known writer, turns 83 today. Along with Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peruvian Mario Llosa Vargas, he was part of the Latin American boom in literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Encyclopedia Britannica has his biography here.
His best known books are 1962’s The Death of Artemio Cruz, about an dying soldier looking back on his life, and 1985’s The Old Gringo, the story of an American writer in the Mexican revolution that was made into a 1989 movie with Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda and Jimmy Smits.
Here’s some clips of Fuentes on The Charlie Rose Show.
In this article for the Latin American Herald-Tribune, Fuentes discussed the history of Latin American literature.
The Hispanic Reader 