A writers’ conference in San Miguel de Allende was inevitable. The town has been luring writers to its colonial courtyards, glorious sunsets, and quiet writing studios for many decades. It was emerging as “the creative crossroads of the Americas” long before we thought to call it that.
Felipe Cossío del Pomar, the Peruvian painter and writer who founded the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes (University School of Fine Arts) in 1938 and the Instituto Allende in 1950, is the author of six books including studies of colonial Mexican and Peruvian painters, the art and life of Paul Gauguin, and the biography of a left-wing Peruvian activist.
In the 50s and 60s, the Beat writers moved in and out of San Miguel and frequented the infamous La Cucaracha bar when it was located on a corner of the Jardin. Neal Cassady, who was thinly disguised in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as Dean Moriarty, died here in San Miguel. (In an “Homage to the Beats” weekend we produced several years ago, Neal’s son, John, visited San Miguel for the first time. In a moving ritual, we took him to the railroad tracks where his father’s body had been found. Legends vary about the circumstances of Neal Cassady’s death.)
Vance Packard, whose breakthrough exposé of the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders, sold over a million copies, came to San Miguel in 1957 and made it his home base for more than twenty years. Clifford Irving, a fine novelist, wrote several of his later novels here. Unfortunately, he is best known for his unauthorized biography of Howard Hughes, for which he spent some time in prison for falsely claiming to have interviewed Hughes.
Author and journalist Gerald Green spent considerable time in San Miguel in the 70s. He wrote many novels, the best known being The Last Angry Man, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie. He wrote the script for a critically acclaimed 1978 TV miniseries, Holocaust, that won eight Emmy Awards and was credited with persuading the West German government to repeal the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. Green was awarded the Dag Hammarskjöld International Peace Prize for literature in 1979. Green was also a writer, producer, and director for NBC News where, in 1952, he co-created (with Dave Garroway) NBC’s The Today Show.
Gary Jennings wrote his acclaimed novel Aztec here in San Miguel. According to local lore, no one believed him when he told his drinking buddies that he was writing a novel. Jennings’s long novels are justly praised for their rich detail and exhaustive research. Jennings even learned Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
San Miguel was a writing retreat for short-story writer and novelist Hal Bennett, who chronicled life in the segregated American South from the Black man’s perspective. Charles Portis lived in San Miguel while he was writing his legendary novel, True Grit.
In the 1980s, the most well-known writer in town and the organizer of readings and gatherings for writers throughout that decade was Robert Somerlott. He helped found the San Miguel chapter of PEN and organized regular readings at Bellas Artes. Somerlott is the author of at least a dozen books including The Flamingos, history books, studies of occult experiences, and a guide to writing fiction. He lived in San Miguel almost forty years and wrote a guide to the town, San Miguel de Allende, in 1990.
The late Patricia Goedicke won numerous prizes for her fiction and poetry. Her husband was Leonard Wallace Robinson, who wrote for the New Yorker and was the book editor for Esquire Magazine. They lived in San Miguel, and Patricia taught at the University of Guanajuato until they returned to the States in 1981.
Acclaimed screenwriter William Wittliff, who adapted Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lonesome Dove for a television mini-series and wrote the screenplay for The Perfect Storm, spent a part of each year in San Miguel for many years before his death in 2019. Kathryn Blair lived in San Miguel while writing her historical novel In the Shadow of the Angel, often called “the Gone with the Wind of Mexico.” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.D. Snodgrass lived in San Miguel part-time for many years, as did Joe Persico, who partnered with former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to write Powell’s autobiography, and whose many books also include Morrow: An American Original; Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial; and Roosevelt’s Secret War.
San Miguel was part-time home to the celebrated Mexican writer Daniel Sada Villarreal, winner of both the prestigious Premio Herralde prize for his novel Almost Never and the National Prize for Arts and Sciences.
Others who have lived and worked in San Miguel more recently, some of whom are still here, include Víctor Sahuatoba, a Mexican novelist and poet who has been a key organizer of literary activities in San Miguel for several decades; Alice Denham, the only Playboy centerfold feature who published a story in the same edition, and whose fiction and non-fiction books include Sleeping with Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the 1950s and 60s, and Secrets of San Miguel; prolific writer Wayne Greenhaw, winner of the Harper Lee award for fiction, and for whom the Literary Sala Community Fund is named; Beverly Donofrio, who wrote Riding in Cars with Boys, which became a movie starring Drew Barrymore; Tobias Wolff, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Carl Franz, who wrote the beloved People’s Guide to Mexico; National Book Award finalist Ron Hansen; Pete Dexter, who won the National Book Award for fiction in 1988 for his novel, Paris Trout; Mary Morris, who’s travel memoir Nothing to Declare takes place partly in San Miguel and was written while she was living here; Maruja Gonzales, who won the Ibargüengoitia Prize in 2004 for her novel Los Empeños de Consuelo, a very funny book; Tony Cohan, whose account of discovering and moving to San Miguel in his bestselling On Mexican Time helped persuade who knows how many Americans and Canadians to move here, and who continues to turn out popular books; Judyth Hill, who, in addition to writing exceptional poetry, is legendary in her ability to teach others to love it; and John Scherber, a prolific writer whose works include a mystery series that takes place in San Miguel.
Indian author Kiran Desai won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award for her novel The Inheritance of Loss in 2006. She and her mother Anita Desai, also an award-winning novelist and humanities professor at MIT, still spends part of each year in San Miguel.
The much beloved and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver used San Miguel as a retreat for many years. Laura Jane Fraser, author of An Italian Affair, has a home in San Miguel. Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden has spent several summers here and has also been a keynote speaker at the Writers’ Conference. Award-winning novelist and poet Elizabeth Rosner divides her time between Berkeley, California, and San Miguel.
Our current literary scene includes novelist and poet Sandra Cisneros, winner of the American Book Award, PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and whose House on Mango Street has become a classic in school classrooms across the U.S. Sandra has keynoted the San Miguel Writers’ Conference. Her memoir A House of My Own and her poetry book Woman Without Shame have garnered international book tours and appearances on major talk shows. She resides in San Miguel.
Novelist and poet Jennifer Clement was the first woman to hold the office of President of International PEN. Her recent novel, Prayers for the Stolen, won several prestigious prizes and was made into a movie. She is also the author of Gun Love, the acclaimed memoir Widow Basquiat (on the painter Jean Michel Basquiat and New York City in the early 1980s), The Promised Party, and several books of poetry. She founded San Miguel’s Poetry Week in 1995, a popular event that took place here every January for more than two decades. She resides in San Miguel and Mexico City.
Before Gerard Helferich began writing non-fiction books, he spent twenty-five years working as an editor and publisher at various houses in New York City, including Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley. Since then, he has written five critically acclaimed, award winning, and bestselling books of nonfiction, including Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin and Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya.
San Miguel Writers’ Conference co-founder and president Susan Page wrote five bestselling books about relationships, all perennial back-list favorites and all still in print. They include If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I still Single?
San Miguel Chapter of PEN
In 1979, Peter Elstob founded the San Miguel chapter of PEN International, an association of writers with 145 Centers in 104 countries. Promoting friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers everywhere, PEN represents the conscience of literature, and vigorously defends writers worldwide who have been persecuted for their work. In 1987, San Miguel PEN began their popular Winter Lecture Series to raise funds for their heroic efforts.
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This snapshot of San Miguel’s literary legacy is by no means complete, but it describes the rich soil in which the seeds of our present writers’ conference were planted. Send us additions to this history that you know of!