Mariano Azuela

Mariano Azuela wrote the first and still the defining novel of the Mexican Revolution while serving as a doctor with Pancho Villa's forces. He qualified in medicine at Guadalajara and practised in his home town of Lagos de Moreno, supporting Madero's rising against Diaz and briefly holding local office. When Huerta murdered Madero in 1913 he joined the revolutionary army of Julian Medina, a Villista general, as a field surgeon. Los de Abajo - The Underdogs - was written out of that and serialised in an El Paso newspaper in 1915 while he was in exile in Texas after Villa's defeat. It follows a peasant, Demetrio Macias, who takes to the hills after a run-in with the local boss and rises to general without ever quite knowing what he is fighting for; asked at the end why he is still fighting, he throws a stone into a canyon and watches it roll. The book is not celebratory. Its revolutionaries loot, its intellectuals are opportunists, and its central image is a movement with its own momentum and no destination. It was ignored for a decade and rediscovered in 1924 during a newspaper argument about whether Mexico had a virile national literature, after which it became a school text. He kept practising medicine among the poor of Mexico City for the rest of his life and wrote about twenty more books, none of which had the same reception. He accepted the National Prize for Literature in 1949 and remained sceptical of the regime the revolution produced.

• Lived: 1873 CE – 1952 CE
• Nationality: Mexican
• Roles: writer, physician