SOURCE: "Epilogue: Literature Is Fire," translated by Maureen Ahern De Maurer, in Doors and Mirrors: Fiction and Poetry from Spanish America, 1920–1970, edited by Hortense Carpentier and Janet Brof, Grossman Publishers, 1972, pp. 430-35.

Vargas Llosa delivered the famous speech "Literature Is Fire" in Caracas, Venezuela, upon acceptance of the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which he was awarded for The Green House. In the following excerpt from that speech, he expounds on the writer's vocation as the critic and conscience of society.

In general, the Latin American writer has lived and written under exceptionally difficult circumstances because our societies assembled a cold and almost perfect machinery to discourage and kill in him his vocation. That vocation, in addition to being beautiful, is absorbing and tyrannical and demands of its skilled total involvement. How could they make of literature an exclusive calling, a militant cause, if they lived surrounded by people...