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    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "The Old Gringo"
    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "The Old Gringo"
    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "The Old Gringo"
    Ebook42 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "The Old Gringo"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "The Old Gringo," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535838726
    A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "The Old Gringo"

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      A Study Guide for Carlos Fuentes's "The Old Gringo" - Gale

      1

      The Old Gringo

      Carlos Fuentes

      1985

      Introduction

      The Old Gringo is one of Carlos Fuentes's best-known works. It is a complex novel that intertwines psychology, mythology, and political events to examine the culture of modern Mexico. At the core of the story is the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, an American newspaperman and short-story writer. Bierce, who is most remembered for his brutally sardonic parody The Devil's Dictionary and the often-anthologized short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, left his job and home in 1913 at age seventy-one and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Speculation has held that he went to Mexico to join Pancho Villa in fighting the revolution, but there has never been conclusive evidence to support this. Bierce is the old gringo referred to in this novel's title. The story focuses on the relationships the character forms in Mexico with Harriet Winslow, a schoolteacher from Washington, DC, and with General Tomás Arroyo, leader of the revolutionary band that is on its way to meet up with Villa's army. The three form a triangle, exploring questions of love, respect, and sensuality in ways that highlight the differences between Mexican and American ways of thinking. A few years after the book was published, it was adapted into a motion picture starring Jane Fonda, Jimmy Smits, and Gregory Peck as the old gringo.

      Author Biography

      Carlos Fuentes is considered one of the preeminent voices in Mexican literature in the last half of the twentieth century. He was born in Panama City, Panama, in 1928, and is the son of a Mexican diplomat. Throughout his childhood, he moved from one country to another, living in Chile, Argentina, and the United States. In his early years, he spent much time in Washington, DC, which is described vividly in The Old Gringo. He attended high school in Mexico City and received degrees from the National University of Mexico and the Institut des Hautes-Etudes in Geneva, Switzerland.

      Fuentes's writing career developed after he already had a successful career in the diplomatic corps. Even after he was an internationally recognized novelist, he remained in politics, holding such positions as the chief of the Department of Cultural Relations of Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, from 1975 to 1977, as his country's ambassador to France. His development as a writer coincided with the emergence of a Latin American avante garde during the late 1950s and early 1960s. This movement also included Julio Cortazar and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez.

      Fuentes's fiction has developed throughout the years. His first novels, The Good Conscience and Where

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