Ariel Dorfman

Ariel Dorfman is the son of Fanny Dorfman and Adolf Dorfman, an Argentine professor of economics. The family moved from Argentina to the U.S. before then settling in Chile when Dorfman was around the age of twelve. Dorfman completed his schooling at the University of Santiago. In the early 1970s, Dorfman worked as a cultural adviser to Salvador Allende, Chile’s first socialist president. His 1971 book-length essay on American imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck, became a bestseller throughout Latin America and, eventually, the world. In 1973 Dorfman was forced to leave Chile for the U.S. when a military coup led by General Pinochet overthrew Allende’s government. The new dictator banned How to Read Donald Duck and ordered any copies of it burned. Dorfman continued to write while living in the U.S. and became a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University in 1985. His best-known work, Death and the Maiden, was completed in 1990 and deals with Chile’s pained transition from dictatorship to democracy. More recently, Dorfman and his family have divided their time between Chile and the U.S., a way of living which serves as the subject for the 1998 memoir, Heading North, Looking South: A Bilingual Journey. Much of Dorfman’s work concerns issues of human rights, tyranny, and power.