SOURCE: "The History of a Passion: Introduction to Mario Vargas Llosa," in Mario Vargas Llosa, Ungar, 1986, 202 p.

In the following excerpt, Williams provides an overview of Vargas Llosa's career and the literary, social, and political contexts that influenced his writing.

Mario Vargas Llosa is the prodigy of the writers associated with the "boom" of Latin American literature. With the possible exception of Carlos Fuentes, he has also been the most prolific. By the mid-1970s, this disciplined Peruvian—at that time still not forty years old—had published enough for three respectable lifetime careers. First, he was the renowned creator of five novels; second, he was an academic scholar, author of two critical studies and numerous articles; and third, he was a journalist widely read throughout the Hispanic world.

By 1966, at the age of thirty, Vargas Llosa was already one of the most prominent writers in Latin America...