Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa

Martín Luis Guzmán was many things throughout his career in twentieth-century Mexico: a soldier in Pancho Villa's revolutionary army, a journalist-in-exile, one of the most esteemed novelists and scholars of the revolutionary era, and an elder statesman and politician. In The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa, we see the famous author as he really was: a careful craftsman of his own image and legacy. His five-volume biography of Villa propelled him to the heights of Mexican cultural life, and thus began his true life's work. Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody shapes this study of Guzmán through the lens of ""life writing"" and uncovers a tireless effort by Guzmán to shape his public image.

The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa places Guzmán's work in a biographical context, shedding light on the immediate motivations behind his writing in a given moment and the subsequent ways in which he rewrote or repackaged the material. Despite his efforts to establish a definitive reading of his life and literature, Guzmán was unable to control that interpretation as audiences became less tolerant of the glaring omissions in his self-portrait.