 According to Raymond L. Williams , it was not until the 1970s , when enough Latin American writers had published novels dealing with military regimes , that " dictator novel " became common nomenclature . The most celebrated novels of this era were Alejo Carpentier 's Reasons of State ( 1974 ) , Augusto Roa Bastos 's I , the Supreme ( 1974 ) , and Gabriel García Marquez 's The Autumn of the Patriarch ( 1975 ) . He defines the dictator novel as a novel which draws upon the historical record to create fictionalized versions of dictators . In this way , the author is able to use the specific to explain the general , as many dictator novels are centred around the rule of a one particular dictator . Within this group he includes those novelists who took to task authoritarian figures such as Vargas Llosa 's Conversation in the Cathedral ( 1969 ) and Denzil Romero 's La tragedia del Generalísimo ( 1984 ) . He even includes Sergio Ramírez 's ¿ Te dio miedo la sangre ? ( 1977 ) , a novel about Nicaraguan society under the Somoza dictatorship , which has been described as a " dictator novel without the dictator " . 
