Carlos Fuentes, Mexican Novelist, Dies at 83 Daniel Aguilar/Reuters Carlos Fuentes at his Mexico City home in 2003. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country's history for readers around the world, died on Tuesday in Mexico City. His death was confirmed by Julio Ortega, his biographer and a professor of Hispanic studies at Brown University, where Mr. Fuentes taught for several years. No cause was given. Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and "70s known as "El Boom." He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and more than a dozen novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love, that were acclaimed throughout Latin America. Mr. Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel "The Old Gringo," a convoluted tale of the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. The first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best seller north of the border, it was made into a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda, released in 1989. In the tradition of Latin American writers, Mr. Fuentes was an outspoken public intellectual, writing magazine, newspaper and journal articles that criticized the Mexican government during the long period of sometimes repressive single-party rule that ended in 2000 with the election of an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. Mr. Fuentes was more ideological than political. He tended to embrace justice and basic human rights regardless of political labels. He initially supported Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, but turned against it as Castro became increasingly authoritarian. He openly sympathized with Indian rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, and publicly skewered the administration of George W. Bush. Mr. Fuentes was appointed Mexico's ambassador to France in 1975, but he resigned two years later to protest the appointment of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz as ambassador to Spain. Mr. Díaz Ordaz had been president of Mexico in 1968 when Mexican troops opened fire on student protesters in Mexico City. Carlos Fuentes was born on Nov. 11, 1928, in Panama, the son of Berta Macías and Rafael Fuentes, a member of Mexico's diplomatic corps. As his father moved among Mexican embassies, Mr. Fuentes spent his early childhood in several South American countries. Then, in 1936, the family was transferred to Washington, where Mr. Fuentes learned to speak English fluently while enrolled in a public school. In 1940 the family was transferred again, this time to Santiago, Chile, where he began to experiment with writing. In an interview with The New York Times in 1985, Mr. Fuentes said he first had to decide "whether to write in the language of my father or the language of my teachers." He chose Spanish, he said, because he believed that it offered more flexibility than English. There was also a practical reason. English, he said, "with a long and uninterrupted literary tradition, did not need one more writer." He was 16 when his family finally moved back to Mexico. He knew his homeland through the stories that his grandmothers had told during the summers he spent with them. "I think I became a writer because I heard those stories," he said in 2006 in an interview with The Academy of Achievement, a nonprofit organization based in Washington. His grandmothers fascinated him with their tales of bandits, revolution and reckless love. "They had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and hearts," Mr. Fuentes said. So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies - the two authors of my books, really. When he told his family that he wanted to be a writer, his father was encouraging, but insisted that he also study law, which he did in Mexico and later in Switzerland. After completing his degree, Mr. Fuentes entered Mexico's diplomatic service, while also carving out time for his fiction. His first novel, "Where the Air Is Clear," was published in 1958 when he turned 30. It was a literary sensation, mixing biting social commentary with interior monologues and portrayals of the subconscious. His reputation established, Mr. Fuentes left government service to devote all his energies to writing.