Carlos Fuentes has been intrigued for forty years by stories of the celebrated American writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce and by his mysterious disappearance in Mexico during the civil war there. In The Old Gringo, Fuentes imagines the fate of Bierce among Pancho Villa's troops and portrays the encounter of two cultures, North American and Mexican, through the passionate triangular relationship of Bierce, a younger American woman named Harriet Winslow who has come to Mexico as a governess, and Tomas Arroyo, a Mexican general under Villa.