Rafael Arévalo Martínez (25 July 1884, Guatemala City –12 June 1975, Guatemala City) was a Guatemalan writer. He was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, diplomat, and director of Guatemala’s national library for more than 20 years. Though Arévalo Martínez’s fame has waned, he is still considered important because of his short stories, and one in particular: The man who resembled a horse and the biography of president Manuel Estrada Cabrera, ¡Ecce Pericles!. Arévalo Martínez was director of the Guatemalan National Library from 1926 until 1946, when he became for a year Guatemala’s representative before the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. He was the political and literary counterpart of his more famous countryman, Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias; while Arévalo Martínez was