The Old Gringo () is a novel by Carlos Fuentes, first published in 1985. Its English language translation of the same year was the first novel by a Mexican author to be a U.S. bestseller and was one of three nominees for the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award as best novel of 1985. An unsuccessful adaptation to film followed in 1989. Later criticism has found in the novel a wary consideration of the irreconcilability of United States and Mexican mindsets. Plot The novel is framed as the reminiscence of a female character (identified as Harriet Winslow through its course) "now she sits alone and remembers". An embittered American writer and former journalist, not named until the final chapter as Ambrose Bierce, decides to leave his old life behind and seek death in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. A widower whose two sons are dead and whose daughter refuses to speak to him, he seeks out part of the Army of the North under Pancho Villa. The particular group he encounters in Chihuahua, led by 'General' Tomás Arroyo, has just liberated the massive hacienda of the Miranda family. Arroyo is mestizo, the product of the rape of his mother by his Miranda father, and is persuaded by the old gringo to let him join the revolutionary force. At that same hacienda, the old man meets Harriet Winslow, a 31-year-old woman from Washington D.C., hired as a blind to tutor the Miranda children, while the family has fled the country. Harriet, however, refuses to leave the hacienda, insisting that she has been paid and will wait for the family's return. At first, she will not call Arroyo "General" (insisting that he has merely given himself the title), and has a patronizing view of the revolutionary army and the Mexican people. Her own father had disappeared during the earlier American invasion of Cuba and the Winslow family has been living off his army pension. Only Harriet knew that he had really stayed behind to live with a mulatto woman. Harriet is committed into the care of the old gringo, who subsequently falls in love with her. The gringo displays considerable courage under fire, risking what seems like obvious death, and gains a reputation for valor. However, his refusal to obey Arroyo's order to shoot a captured Federal officer means that the 'General' could have him executed. Instead Arroyo shoots the officer himself, then