Martín Luis Guzmán

The Mexican writer Martín Luis Guzmán

Martín Luis Guzmán (born October 6, 1887 in Chihuahua , † December 22, 1976 in Mexico City ) was a Mexican newspaper journalist and writer and, along with Mariano Azuela, is one of the pioneers of the revolutionary novel , a genre that deals with the Mexican revolution .

biography

Guzmán was born on October 6, 1887 in Chihuahua, the son of a career officer. He grew up in Mexico City and Veracruz , where he attended boys' Catholic schools. In 1908 he began studying law in Mexico City. His fellow students include the later authors Pedro Henríquez Ureña , Alfonso Reyes , Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos . Guzmán took part in events organized by their group Ateneo de la Juventud and writes for various daily newspapers.

With the beginning of the revolutionary unrest in 1910, Guzmán joined the reformers around the presidential candidate Francisco Madero and took part in demonstrations against the re-election of the dictator Porfirio Díaz . After Madero's assassination in 1913, Guzmán joined the troops of the Revolutionary General Francisco Villa and rose to become a coronel. He was arrested that same year and went into exile in Spain the following year. There he published his first book, La querella de México .

Between 1916 and 1920 he lived and wrote in New York . There he worked, among other things, as head of the Spanish-language magazine El Gráfico and wrote for El Universal . He published the articles in an anthology entitled A Orillas del Hudson (1920).

After his return to Mexico, Guzmán continued working as a journalist and founded the evening newspaper El Mundo . He was elected member of the Partido Nacional Cooperativista, but had to flee again into exile in Spain in 1924 after Plutarco Elias Calles was elected president. He stayed there until the eve of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. In his novels El águila y la serpiente (1928) and La sombra del caudillo , which were initially banned in Mexico by the censors , he processed his memories of the Mexican civil war and the Follow-up time. His most important work, however, is Memorias de Pancho Villa (1940), a fictional autobiography by Pancho Villa, in which Guzmán processed numerous historical documents.

After his return, the post-revolutionary political leadership of the PRI stylized him as a leading figure in Mexican literature. From 1953 to 1958 Guzmán was the UN ambassador to Mexico. He received the National Book Prize for his novel Muertes Históricas (1958). In 1970 he became a senator.

Martín Luis Guzmán died in Mexico City on December 22, 1976.

Web links

• Literature by and about Martín Luis Guzmán in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Martín Luis Guzmán in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin