Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate who died this past Sunday, spent the better part of his literary career novelizing the history of Latin America. It's curious, then, that when he reflected on Latin America's traumatic past in a 1995 essay for Reason,

The Nobel Prize–winning novelist, who died this week, traveled through both literature and politics with a heedlessness you had to admire.

Mr. Vargas Llosa, who ran for Peru’s presidency in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.