Which Mexican author wrote the novel 'The Old Gringo'?

Carlos Fuentes wrote the novel The Old Gringo. Published in Spanish as Gringo viejo in 1985, it is a historical and psychological novel set during the Mexican Revolution.

The story imagines what happened to Ambrose Bierce, the American writer and journalist who disappeared in Mexico in 1913 after traveling south to join the revolutionary upheaval. Fuentes places a fictionalized Bierce alongside Harriet Winslow, an American tutor, and Tomás Arroyo, a revolutionary general. Their relationships become a way to examine class, cultural distance, national identity, and the uneasy history between Mexico and the United States.

Fuentes used a real historical mystery as the novel’s starting point, but the book is not a biography of Bierce. Its treatment of Bierce’s fate is deliberately imaginative. The revolutionary setting also connects the novel to Mexico’s political history, especially the forces associated with Pancho Villa. Readers sometimes confuse Fuentes with Octavio Paz because both were major Mexican writers of the twentieth century, but Paz was primarily known for poetry, essays, and works such as The Labyrinth of Solitude. The Old Gringo was adapted into a 1989 film starring Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, and Jimmy Smits.