Dorfman, Ariel (1942–)

Ariel Dorfman is a playwright, essayist, fiction writer, and human rights activist. Born to a Jewish family in Argentina, his family moved from the United States to Chile in 1954, where he would eventually both attend and teach at the University of Chile in Santiago. From 1970 to 1973, Dorfman was a member of the administration of President Salvador Allende, a socialist physician whom the American government had actively opposed. On September 11, 1973, Allende's democratically elected government was violently overthrown in a military coup that put the infamous dictator General Augusto Pinochet in power. Dorfman was forced into exile, living and writing in the United States until the restoration of Chilean democracy began in 1990. Since 1985, he has taught at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he is currently Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies.

His play Death and the Maiden, perhaps his best-known work, was completed in Chile in the early 1990s as he observed his country's painful transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The politically charged play follows Paulina Salas, a former political prisoner in an unnamed Latin American country, whose husband unknowingly brings home the man she believes to have tortured and raped her more than 20 years before. It is a drama rooted in Chile's particular human rights crisis, yet the lyrical power of Dorfman's writing has made the play a touchstone for exploring similar issues around the world. It has been staged in more than 30 countries;Germany alone had 50 productions running simultaneously in 1993. In 1994 the play was adapted for film, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley, directed by Roman Polanski;one part of Dorfman's “Resistance Trilogy”with Reader and the novel Widows. Author of the novels Blake's Remedy, The Nanny and the Iceberg, and Konfidenz, Dorfman can be counted as part of the vibrant politically engaged Latin American literary tradition of Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez.

Dorfman has been a dedicated public intellectual and prolific commentator on issues related to Latin American politics, American cultural hegemony, war, and human rights, for the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, El País, Granta, and Le Monde. He has also worked with organizations such as Amnesty International, Index on Censorship, and Human [Page 473]Rights Watch. He used his firsthand experience of pre-Pinochet Chile, a functioning democracy with an independent press and judiciary and a military under civilian control, and its sudden end, as a platform for impassioned response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, in essays such as “Americans Must Now Feel What the Rest of Us Have Known”and “Chile: The Other September 11.”Dorfman now divides his time between the United States and Santiago.