José Agustín Ramírez Gómez (19 August 1944 – 16 January 2024) was a Mexican novelist, short story writer, essayist and screenwriter.[1] Publishing under the pen nameJosé Agustín, he was considered one of the most influential and prolific Mexican writers of the second half of the 20th century.[2]
Agustín participated in Juan José Arreola's writers' workshop from 1962 to 1965, where he wrote his first novel, La tumba ("The Tomb"), when he was nineteen years old.[2] The novel was the brief but provocative story of a Mexican upper-class teen, deemed indecent by the public but gathering praise from older writers. This and his most famous work, De perfil ("Profile View"), a fast and detailed view of three days in the main character's life, show stylistic similarities to James Joyce's work, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Agustín was considered a member of the so-called Onda literature, onda (wave) being slang for current and fashionable views in the eyes of young people.
A common technique in his work is mixing a character's speech with narrative, without making any kind of distinction (free indirect discourse). Thus the reader finds a long dialogue written in a single sentence, and is expected to realize which character is speaking as he reads the words. He also made use of the stream of consciousness technique.[5]
The Mexican band Belafonte Sensacional wrote the song "Epic Aris" inspired by the literary works of José Agustín and Parménides García Saldaña, another writer who was considered a member of La Onda literature.[13]