His death was confirmed by Julio Ortega, his biographer and a professor of Hispanic studies at Brown University, where Mr. Fuentes taught for several years. No cause was given.
Mr. Fuentes was one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s known as “El Boom.” He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and more than a dozen novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love, that were acclaimed throughout Latin America.
