SOURCE: "Social Commitment and the Latin American Writer," in World Literature Today, Vol. 52, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 6-14.

In the following essay, Llosa explains the obligation Latin American writers feel to be not only artists but political activists as well.

The Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas killed himself on the second day of December 1969 in a classroom of La Molina Agricultural University in Lima. He was a very discreet man, and so as not to disturb his colleagues and the students with his suicide, he waited until everybody had left the place. Near his body was found a letter with very detailed instructions about his burial—where he should be mourned, who should pronounce the eulogies in the cemetery—and he asked too that an Indian musician friend of his play the huaynos and mulizas he was fond of. His will was respected, and Arguedas, who had been...