Alfredo Armas Alfonzo

Who was Alfredo Armas Alfonzo?

Alfredo Armas Alfonzo was a Venezuelan writer, critic, editor and historian, well known throughout Latin America. He was a master of the modern fable, a precursor of what soon would be called magical realism.

Alfonzo grew up in the llanos of interior Venezuela, Clarines, Puerto Píritu and Cumaná, and later attended the first classes at the new journalism school of the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. He worked for the Postal Service in Barcelona, Venezuela and petroleum companies in new towns established in eastern Venezuela, and worked as the eastern correspondent for the Caracas newspaper El Nacional. He founded the literary magazine, Revista Literaria Jagüey and organized and presided over the first conference of the Venezuelan Journalists Association.

Alfonzo continued to write for various newspapers and to found and direct new magazines, while working for first the government and then Creole Petroleum Corporation. In his fiction he developed an imaginative style, and he published Los Cielos de la Muerte in 1949. In 1962 he resigned from Creole Petroleum and went to work for the Universidad de Oriente.