At a 1976 movie premiere in Mexico City, Mario Vargas Llosa famously punched his soon-to-be ex-friend, novelist Gabriel García Márquez, in the face. Some theorize the ruckus was about Vargas Llosa’s wife. Others believe it was a row over politics, as Vargas Llosa would soon refer to García Márquez as “Castro’s courtesan.”

I like to think the latter happened. Because the only thing Vargas Llosa, who died this week at the age of 87 in Spain, seemed to detest more than tedious prose was collectivism. And while the likes of García Márquez, who died in 2014, continued to adulate the dictator in Cuba, Vargas Llosa emerged as not only one of the era’s finest novelists but one of liberty’s most zealous champions.

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Like virtually every Latin American intellectual in the second half of the 20th century, Vargas Llosa began his career as a socialist. The author’s first novel, The Time of the Hero, a fictional retelling of the sadistic bullying and torture he saw as a young cadet in a Lima military academy, was deemed communist propaganda by the Peruvian military, which reportedly burned copies of the book.

And maybe it was. Vargas Llosa traveled to Cuba five times in the 1960s, where he “defended the revolution in manifestos, articles, and public acts,” both in his then-adopted country, France, and Latin America. His drift from Marxism to classical liberalism was gradual, given a push by the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and completed by 1970 when Castro jailed his dissident author friends. “I slowly began to understand that the ‘formal freedoms’ of so-called bourgeois democracy were not a mere appearance that covered up the exploitation of the poor by the rich, but rather the boundary between human rights, freedom of expression, and political diversity and an authoritarian and repressive system,” he would later write.

Unlike so many intellectuals of his age, Vargas Llosa was dismayed by all iterations of tyranny. The prolific writer began his career as a part-time crime reporter in his teenage years and worked nonstop for five decades. As far as I can figure, Vargas Llosa, who was known for writing every morning, seven days a week, authored 21 novels, nine short story collections, and 14 nonfiction books, and that’s not counting numerous plays, hundreds of essays, and a biweekly column for El País.

Vargas Llosa once said, “Literature is fire.” It certainly felt like it when reading his novels. I’m far from a completist, but reading Vargas Llosa’s novels has been an exhilarating experience. The most riveting, violent, and beautiful of them is The War of the End of the World, a sweeping historical epic set in 19th-century Brazil that touches on faith, revolution, Armageddon, poverty, the state, and redemption. It won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, but don’t hold that against it.

The Feast of the Goat, perhaps the author’s best-known work, is set during the last days of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic and depicts the paranoiac and suffocating life under dictatorship. Though I’m not a literary critic, I doubt many authors have ever been able to write such monumental stories about big ideas without losing the intimacy and humanity of their characters.

Indeed, one of the criticisms of modern conservatives is they don’t know how to do culture, or rather that they’re incapable of producing worthwhile culture because of their illiberal mentality and inhibited worldview. Vargas Llosa debunked this contention every time his pen hit paper. His life is a good lesson on why conservatives should engage in and take culture seriously rather than mock and dismiss it. And Vargas Llosa didn’t fashion clumsy polemic posing as novels. He wrote about truth. No column, essay, or speech will ever convey the inner struggle of people crushed under the weight of power or corruption like a great novel. There’s a reason, as Vargas Llosa pointed out, that “in all dictatorial, authoritarian, totalitarian regimes,” literature is feared and banned.

Every time I see a pile of García Márquez’s tedious One Hundred Years of Solitude at a Barnes and Noble, I think about how criminally underread Vargas Llosa is here in the United States. It’s difficult to find translations of his earlier work. Audible, for instance, barely has any. And perhaps that has something to do with his outspoken politics.

The Left never forgave him for turning away from socialism. Entire books have been written about his alleged turn to “authoritarian neoliberalism.” In 2023, the New Yorker was still “puzzling” over why, despite his criticism of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s “buffooneries,” the novelist would oppose Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and other South American socialists. Even the paleo-Right laments his allegedly “intolerant” and “narrow” neoliberalism.

Vargas Llosa’s ideas were not merely theoretical, though his aspirations for political office would never materialize. After launching the Movimiento Libertad party and successfully campaigning against the bank seizures in Peru in 1987, Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency in 1990 on free-market reforms and a promise to crush Maoist terrorist groups such as Shining Path, which had murdered thousands of his fellow citizens. In his fantastic memoir, A Fish in the Water, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes the story of his exotic childhood with his failed run for office. Even after a big lead in the polls, Vargas Llosa decisively lost a second runoff to a coalition of left-leaning groups led by an academic, Alberto Fujimori. The novelist warned that the Peruvian government would devolve into a corrupt, autocratic state. And it did, as Fujimori joined the long line of South American leaders who promised equality and prosperity and delivered despotism.

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Fujimori stripped the novelist of his Peruvian citizenship in 1990. Vargas Llosa moved to Spain, where he continued writing about the struggles of South America. “In all this we see the fear of freedom,” Vargas Llosa wrote upon Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013. “The fear that comes to man as a legacy from his primitive past, from the world before democracy and before the individual, when man was a material and gave over his free will and his initiative to a demigod, who made all the important decisions about his life,” he said.

In 2018, Vargas Llosa released one of his final works, The Call of the Tribe, a philosophical “autobiography” that traces his own thinking through the intellectuals who influenced him most — Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel. But Vargas Llosa’s influence is up there with his heroes. He was one of his age’s great old-school literary giants and intellectual pugilists. He was likely the last of his kind. Rest in peace.