“I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writ­ing seri­ous­ly,” Car­los Fuentes said in his 1981 Paris Review inter­view. “There are peo­ple who see the end quick­ly, like Rim­baud. When you start see­ing it, you feel you have to res­cue these things. Death is the great Mae­ce­nas, Death is the great angel of writ­ing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.”

Fuentes died Tues­day at the age of 83. He wrote seri­ous­ly right up to the end, pub­lish­ing more than 50 books in his life­time, includ­ing Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz and Ter­ra Nos­tra. He was one of Latin Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing voic­es of the past half cen­tu­ry, and Mex­i­co’s most renowned nov­el­ist. Despite his deep con­nec­tion with his native coun­try, Fuentes lived a sig­nif­i­cant part of his life abroad. As the son of a Mex­i­can diplo­mat he was born in Pana­ma and began his school­ing in Wash­ing­ton D.C.. Lat­er he accept­ed his own diplo­mat­ic and aca­d­e­m­ic post­ings abroad. As he told the Paris Review, the sep­a­ra­tion helped him as a writer:

I am grate­ful for my sense of detach­ment because I can say things about my coun­try oth­er peo­ple don’t say. I offer Mex­i­cans a mir­ror in which they can see how they look, how they talk, how they act, in a coun­try which is a masked coun­try. Of course, I real­ize that my writ­ings are my masks as well, ver­bal masks I offer my coun­try as mir­rors. Mex­i­co is defined in the leg­end of Quet­zal­coatl, the Plumed Ser­pent, the god who cre­ates man and is destroyed by a demon who offers him a mir­ror. The demon shows him he has a face when he thought he had no face. This is the essense of Mex­i­co: to dis­cov­er you have a face when you thought you only had a mask.

To learn more about Fuentes, you can watch the brief video above from AARP Viva, which is in Span­ish with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, and a 19-minute inter­view below with Char­lie Rose. Both were record­ed last year. In 1981, when the Paris Review inter­view­er asked Fuentes what hooked him and made him want to begin writ­ing, he said: “That won­der­ful thing Ham­let says about ‘a fic­tion, a dream of pas­sion.’ My fic­tion is a dream of pas­sion, born of a cry that says ‘I am incom­plete.’ I want to be com­plete, to be enclosed. I want to add some­thing.”

After return­ing from World War I, Ernest Hem­ing­way moved to Toron­to and began writ­ing for the Toron­to Star. He worked there from 1920 to 1924 and some 70 of his arti­cles have been archived online in an attrac­tive new web­site, the Hem­ing­way Papers. At first Hem­ing­way was a stringer and lat­er he wrote as a staff writer, under the byline Ernest M. Hem­ing­way. His first arti­cle bore the head­line, “Tak­ing a Chance for a Free Shave” and chron­i­cled the young author’s vis­it to a bar­ber col­lege where straight-edge razors were wield­ed for free by stu­dents. He went on to write for the Star about box­ing and trout fish­ing and orga­nized crime in Chica­go. By 1922 Hem­ing­way had moved to Paris with his wife and sent dis­patch­es that antic­i­pat­ed the themes of the nov­els that would make him famous. He wrote about the effects of war, bull­fight­ing and the life of an impov­er­ished artist in Paris. His asso­ci­a­tion with the Star gave him access to post-war Europe that he wouldn’t have had oth­er­wise and work­ing as a reporter taught him how to get up close and per­son­al with his sub­ject mat­ter.

The archive gives vis­i­tors plen­ty to explore, includ­ing com­men­tary about the novelist’s ear­ly assign­ments and embed­ded anno­ta­tions to help put the work in con­text.  Hem­ing­way devel­oped his famous­ly terse, hard-boiled style at the Star and reworked much of his reportage into his fic­tion. Read­ers of his short sto­ries and nov­els will see seeds of Hemingway’s fic­tion in arti­cles like “Tan­cre­do is Dead,” about the death of a man whose job was to tease the bull by stand­ing as still as a stat­ue in the ring:

“No. He was nei­ther an opera singer nor a five-cent cig­ar. He was once known as the bravest man in the world. And he died in a dingy, sor­did room in Madrid, the city where he had enjoyed his great­est tri­umphs.”

Read­ing through Hem­ing­way’s jour­nal­ism is to wit­ness a fic­tion writer in the mak­ing.

Kate Rix writes about k‑12 instruc­tion and high­er ed.