[7] From 1934 to 1940, Fuentes' father was posted to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C.,[8] where Carlos attended English-language school, eventually becoming fluent.

[8] The following year, he published Where the Air Is Clear, which immediately made him a "national celebrity"[8] and allowed him to leave his diplomatic post to write full-time.

[3] Considered "dashingly handsome",[6] Fuentes also had high-profile affairs with actresses Jeanne Moreau and Jean Seberg, who inspired his novel Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone.

[11][12] His friends included Luis Buñuel, William Styron, Friedrich Dürrenmatt,[8] and sociologist C. Wright Mills, to whom he dedicated his book The Death of Artemio Cruz.

[8] In 1989, he was the subject of a full-length PBS television documentary, "Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes," which also aired in Europe and was broadcast repeatedly in Mexico.

[16] He also named Latin American writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti, Miguel Angel Asturias and Jorge Luis Borges.

[18] The novel was celebrated not only for its prose, which made heavy use of interior monologue and explorations of the subconscious,[2] but also for its "stark portrait of inequality and moral corruption in modern Mexico".

[19] A year later, he followed with another novel, The Good Conscience (Las Buenas Conciencias), which depicted the privileged middle classes of a medium-sized town, probably modeled on Guanajuato.

Described by a contemporary reviewer as "the classic Marxist novel", it tells the story of a privileged young man whose impulses toward social equality are suffocated by his family's materialism.

[20] Fuentes was regarded as a leading figure of the Latin American boom in the 1960s and 1970s along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar.

[9] Like many of his works, the novel used rotating narrators, a technique critic Karen Hardy described as demonstrating "the complexities of a human or national personality".

[22] A prolific writer, Fuentes subsequent work in the 1960s include the novel Aura (1962), the short story collection Cantar de Ciego (1966), the novella Zona Sagrada (1967) and A Change of Skin (1967), an ambitious novel that attempts to define a collective Mexican consciousness by exploring and reinterpreting the country's myths.

[23] Fuentes' 1975 Terra Nostra, perhaps his most ambitious novel, is described as a "massive, Byzantine work" that tells the story of all Hispanic civilization.

[23] His 1994 book Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone is an autobiograpichal novel that portrays the actress Jean Seberg who Fuentes had a love affair with in the 1960s.

A companion book to The Death of Artemio Cruz, the characters are from the same period, but the story is told by a woman exiled from her province after the revolution.

[35] Mexican historian Enrique Krauze was a vigorous critic of Fuentes and his fiction, dubbing him a "guerrilla dandy" in a 1988 article for the perceived gap between his Marxist politics and his personal lifestyle.

[38] The Los Angeles Times described Fuentes' politics as "moderate liberal", noting that he criticized "the excesses of both the left and the right".

"[3] The U.S. State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation closely monitored Fuentes during the 1960s, purposefully delaying — and often denying — the author's visa applications.

[3] The Guardian described him as accomplishing "the rare feat for a leftwing Latin American intellectual of adopting a critical attitude towards Fidel Castro's Cuba without being dismissed as a pawn of Washington.

"[7] Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa stated, "with him, we lose a writer whose work and whose presence left a deep imprint".