Terrence McNally, a very popular American playwright of the 1990's, was born in 1939. His play "Love! Valour? Compassion!," a commentary on AIDS, received a Tony Award as well as Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Another play, "Master Class," also earned a Tony, as did the book he wrote for the musical adaptation of "Kiss of the Spider Woman." McNally's other plays include "Corpus Christi" and "Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?" In addition, McNally has written several television scripts; one of them, "Andre's Mother," brought him an Emmy Award.
Puig is fascinated by the variety and richness, and at the same time, by the stultifying effects of pop culture. Most of his novels are technically parodies of some form of pop art while they portray the spiritual emptiness of the characters who are affected by these forms. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968) is an innovative novel narrating through a variety of techniques the story of a young Argentine boy who lives vicariously through the movies. Puig uses the phenomenon of compulsive movie-going as a symbol for alienation and escape from reality. Heartbreak Tango (1969) evokes the spiritual emptiness of the Argentine provincial life in the 1930s and the vulgarity of popular music and the… soap opera; The Buenos Aires Affair (1972) uses the form of the detective novel to parody pop fiction. Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979) examines political and sexual liberation in novelistic techniques that reject traditional dialogue in favor of various other kinds of texts, and in Blood of Unrequited Love, a man and a woman relive an old but passionate affair in the Brazilian backlands. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1981) is a novelty for Puig in that it consists entirely of dialogue, plus an epilogue in letters. Less obviously parodic and more elliptical, with less reliance on the machinery of pop culture, it demonstrates his constant search for a new form for his novels. Puig, who always rejected the category of "homosexual writer," may nevertheless be Latin America's best example of a contemporary gay sensibility in his generally countercultural artistic stance.