The Banana Trilogy

Although Rigoberta Menchú gets most of the attention as Guatemala's Nobel Prize laureate, the country has another in novelist, diplomat, and journalist Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974), who won the 1967 Nobel Prize for literature. Asturias spent his life and career alternately in Guatemala and abroad, living in forced or self-imposed exile during the tenures of the country's many right-wing military governments. He did a stint in Paris as a reporter for several Latin American newspapers during the 1920s, those "Lost Generation" years of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

Asturias never lived in the Atlantic lowlands, but he is inexorably tied to the region, having immortalized the hot and humid eastern coast in his 1950's Viento Fuerte (Strong Wind, or in some translations The Cyclone), 1954's El Papa Verde (The Green Pope), and 1960's Los Ojos de los Enterrados (The Interred). Known collectively as "The Banana Trilogy," these books chronicle the pain inflicted on the country by the United Fruit Company.