Mexico in Mind

Two centuries of writers drawn to Mexico—from D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and Tennessee Williams to Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Sandra Cisneros

This scintillating literary travel guide gathers the work of great writers celebrating Mexico in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Ranging from 1843 to the present, Mexico in Mind offers a remarkably varied sampling of English-speaking writers’ impressions of the land south of the border.

John Reed rides with Pancho Villa in 1914; Graham Greene defends Mexico’s priests; Langston Hughes describes a bullfight; Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs find Mexico intoxicating; Alice Adams visits Frida Kahlo’s house; Ann Louise Bardach meets the mysterious Subcommandante Marcos face to face. Fictional accounts are equally vivid, including poems by Muriel Rukeyser, Archibald Macleish, and Sandra Cisneros, short stories by Katherine Anne Porter and Ray Bradbury, and excerpts from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. From the bustle of Mexico City to coffee planations in remote Chiapas, from Mayan ruins to the markets at Oaxaca, the scenes evoked in this anthology reflect the rich variety of the place and its history, sure to enchant vacationers, expatriates, and armchair travelers everywhere.

Alice Adams ‧ Ann Louise Bardach ‧ Ray Bradbury ‧ William S. Burroughs ‧ Frances Calderon de la Barca ‧ Ana Castillo ‧ Sandra Cisneros ‧ Anita Desai ‧ Erna Fergusson ‧ Charles Macomb Flandrau ‧ Donna Gershten ‧ Graham Greene ‧ Langston Hughes ‧ Fanny Inglehart ‧ Gary Jennings ‧ Diana Kennedy ‧ Jack Kerouac ‧ D. H. Lawrence ‧ Malcolm Lowry ‧ Archibald Macleish ‧ Ruben Martinez ‧ Tom Miller ‧ Katherine Anne Porter ‧ John Reed ‧ Luis Rodriguez ‧ Richard Rodriguez ‧ Muriel Rukeyser ‧ Salman Rushdie ‧ John Steinbeck ‧ Edward Weston ‧ Tennessee Williams

Maria Finn is the editor of the anthology Cuba in Mind (Vintage, 2004) and author of a memoir about falling in love and marrying her cab driver in Havana, Cuba. She has written for Audubon, Saveur, Metropolis, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has published literary work in magazines such as Gastronomica, The Chicago Review, New Letters, and Exquisite Corpse. She has lived and worked in Alaska, Guatemala, and Spain, and traveled extensively in Latin America.