Carlos Fuentes - novelist, diplomat, essayist, lecturer, art critic, and playwright - was born in Panama in 1928 and educated in Latin America, the United States, and Switzerland. In the 1970s, he served as Mexico's ambassador to France, and he was the former Robert F. Kennedy Professor of Latin America at Harvard University. In his life he wrote more than thirty acclaimed books, including Where the Air is Clear, Old Gringo, and The Buried Mirror. Carlos Fuentes died in 2012.