Rafael Arévalo Martínez
Rafael Arévalo Martínez (25 July 1884,
Guatemala City –12 June 1975,
Guatemala City) was a Guatemalan writer. He was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, diplomat, and director of Guatemala’s national library for more than 20 years. Though Arévalo Martínez’s fame has waned, he is still considered important because of his short stories, and one in particular: ''The man who resembled a horse'' and the biography of president
Manuel Estrada Cabrera, ''¡Ecce Pericles!''. Arévalo Martínez was director of the Guatemalan National Library from 1926 until 1946, when he became for a year Guatemala’s representative before the Pan American Union in
Washington, D.C. He was the political and literary counterpart of his more famous countryman, Nobel Prize winner
Miguel Ángel Asturias; while Arévalo Martínez was an unapologetic admirer of the United States, Asturias was a bitter critic of the New Orleans–based
United Fruit Company (now part of
United Brands Company), which he felt had plundered his country.
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