"El Señor Presidente" by Miguel Ángel Asturias

Abstract

El Señor Presidente [The President, 1946] is the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias’ most well known and one of his most critically lauded works. Its importance in the Latin American literary canon was recognized when Asturias received the Novel Prize for Literature in 1967, the first Latin American novelist to do so. The text had a long genesis and development before it took its final form. It began life as two short stories in 1922, which were later combined in 1924 into one unpublished story entitled ‘Los mendigos políticos’ (Himelblau, 1973: 45). Asturias then departed for Europe, to London and then Paris where, at the Sorbonne, he was able to deepen his interest in Mayan culture which would culminate in his first acclaimed book of short stories, Leyendas de Guatemala (1930). He also became ‘immersed in the Parisian avant-garde, above all the Surrealist movement’, which undoubtedly impacted on his writing style in El Señor Presidente (Martin, 1990: 56).