The Time of the Hero

The Time of the Hero (Original title: La ciudad y los perros, literally "The City and the Dogs") is a 1963 novel by Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

It was Vargas Llosa's first novel and is set among the cadets at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, which he attended as a teenager.

The novel portrays the school so scathingly that its leadership burned many copies and condemned the book as Ecuadorian propaganda against Peru.

[4] It is a story about adolescence and young males transition to manhood, but is also described to portray a microcosm of the Peruvian society.

The novel is based on Vargas Llosa's own experiences of Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which he attended as a teenager in the early 1950s.