Rudolfo A. Anaya is known as a novelist, but his work includes essays, short stories, poetry, and drama. Flourishing as a writer during the 1970s, Anaya has written novels that represent the American Southwest and its historical conflicts, often with traces of autobiography subtly fictionalized and patterned after a literary tradition that includes Mexican/Chicano cultural history and the work of American authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau. The American frontier experience and ideas of the wilderness are thus fused in Anaya's novels, resulting in a style and narrative vision that have appealed to both nonspecialist and scholarly readers. Deeply embedded in the cultural history of New Mexico, Anaya's novels have also been the critical arena for national and international scholarly debates on the analysis and interpretation of Chicano literature.

Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya was born in New Mexico on 30 October 1937 in the village of...