Popularity Of Latin American Novelists

            Since the mid-1960's, there has been a tremendous increase in the popularity and quality of Latin And South American novelists; in fact, some call this literary movement "El Boom." Mexico has produced, for example, Carlos Fuentes, who wrote The Death of Artemio Cruz. The 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias. Argentina has given us numerous impressive writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Luisa Velenzuela, and Manurl Puig, whose Kiss of the Spider Woman was made into a film. William Hurt won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in that movie. Another recent novelist who has impressed the world is Chile's Isabelle Allende (The House of the Spirits). The list could go on, but probably the biggest name associated with this movement is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian whose enormously popular One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, help him earn the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.