Manuel Puig was an architecture dropout turned writer, whose novels are better known in the United States for the movies they were later turned into. In Argentina, Puig is thought of as one of the most important contemporary or pop authors.

Puig was born in Buenos Aires and tried to study architecture at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, but dropped out and began working in film. First as an archivist and later as an editor, his real dream was to become a screenwriter but it never worked out. After a time of studying in Europe, he moved back to Argentina and started writing novels. But like many other Argentines through out literary history, he was political and while he was a leftist, he felt the country was in a rightist mood, so he moved to Mexico. While he ended up living in exile most of his life, Puig is considered a solely Argentine novelist. Because so much of his work ended up on television or as films, he gets a pop culture genre attached to his work. Most Americans will know his work, Kiss of the Spider Woman, which was both a Broadway play and a film as well as his novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth.

In all his work, Puig made much of modern society and the obsessions with television, most especially soap operas. His novels incorporate certain elements that are found in film like montages and multiple points of view. If he is to be categorized, it would be as Post Modern or Postboom, which is a newer phrase and term. Puig died in Mexico City at age 59, and has lost his notoriety outside Argentina because his topics were so attached to a mass-media style of culture that no longer exists. He remains one of Argentinas most famous contemporary writers, however.

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