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Ariel Dorfman (born May 6 1942) is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, and human rights activist.

Dorfman, who is Jewish, was born in Argentina but his family moved to the United States shortly after his birth, and then moved to Chile in 1954. He attended and was later a professor at the University of Chile.

From 1970 to 1973, Dorfman was part of the administration of president Salvador Allende. He was forced into exile following the bloody military coup of 1973 in which General Augusto Pinochet came to power.

Since 1985 he has taught at Duke University.

Since the restoration (1990) of democracy in Chile, he divides his time between Santiago and the United States.

Dorfman has written fiction often dealing with the horrors of tyranny and, in later works, the trials of exile. His most famous play, Death and the Maiden, dealt with the encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believed tortured her; it was made into a film in 1994 by Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

Dorfman, a critic of Pinochet, has written extensively about his extradition case for the Spanish newspaper El País and other publications.

Ariel Dorfman is the Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies at Duke University.

Selected books

• How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1984) ISBN 0-88477-023-0
• The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1988) 0140088962
• Heading South, Looking North : A Bilingual Journey (1999) ISBN 0-14-028253-X
• Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet (2002) ISBN 1-58322-542-0
• Burning City (with Joaquin Dorfman) (2006) ISBN 0-375-83204-1

External links

• Ariel Dorfman's website
• Ariel Dorfman's memoir, Heading South, Looking North
• 1988 Audio Interview with Ariel Dorfman by Don Swaim

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