Boom is the name given to a period of Latin American literature from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s. The literature of the Spanish-speaking countries of North and South America gained enormous international readership because of the large number of important novels produced during this time. The major writers of the Boom were Julio Cortázar of Argentina, José Donoso of Chile, Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.
The Boom writers were imaginative and innovative, producing works that often combined political and historical themes. Boom writers developed a style known as magic realism, which blended dreams and magic with everyday reality. Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa, among other Boom novelists, experimented with language and structure, often injecting fantasy and fragmenting time and space.
Perhaps the most important Boom novel was García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Other significant Boom novels include Fuentes’s Where the Air Is Clear (1958) and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Vargas Llosa’s The Green House (1966), Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), and Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night (1970).
The term post-Boom refers to a literary movement that began in the late 1960’s and continues into the 2000’s. Manuel Puig of Argentina led the transition from the Boom to post-Boom with the first major post-Boom novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968). Post-Boom novelists explore new subjects and approaches. Their works often include references to popular culture and mass media, such as television, motion pictures, and popular music. The works have a less complicated narrative style than the Boom novelists. They sometimes use features from romance novels, detective novels, and other forms of popular fiction. Many of the novels are from the point of view of women.
