Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world, died Tuesday in Mexico City. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by Julio Ortega, his biographer and a professor of Hispanic studies at Brown University, where Fuentes taught for several years. No cause was given.

Fuentes was one the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a catalyst, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and ’70s known as “El Boom.” He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and more than a dozen novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love, that were acclaimed throughout Latin America.

Fuentes received wide recognition in the United States in 1985 with his novel “The Old Gringo,” a convoluted tale of the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution. The first book by a Mexican novelist to become a best-seller north of the border, it was made into a film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda, released in 1989.

Fuentes was an outspoken public intellectual, writing magazine, newspaper and journal articles that criticized the Mexican government during the long period of sometimes repressive single-party rule that ended in 2000 with the election of an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada.

Fuentes was more ideological than political. He tended to embrace justice and basic human rights regardless of political labels. He initially supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, but turned against it as Castro became increasingly authoritarian. He openly sympathized with Indian rebels in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, and publicly skewered the administration of George W. Bush.

Carlos Fuentes was born on Nov. 11, 1928, in Panama, the son of Berta Macias and Rafael Fuentes, a member of Mexico’s diplomatic corps. As his father moved among Mexican embassies, Fuentes spent his early childhood in several South American countries. Then, in 1936, the family was transferred to Washington, where Fuentes learned to speak English fluently while enrolled in a public school.

In a 1985 interview, Fuentes said he first had to decide “whether to write in the language of my father or the language of my teachers.” He chose Spanish, he said, because he believed it offered more flexibility than English. There was also a practical reason: English, he said, “with a long and uninterrupted literary tradition, did not need one more writer.”

He was 16 when his family finally moved back to Mexico. He knew his homeland through stories his grandmothers told.

“I think I became a writer because I heard those stories,” he said in a 2006 interview with The Academy of Achievement. His grandmothers fascinated him with their tales of bandits, revolution and reckless love. “They had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and hearts,” Fuentes said. “So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies — the two authors of my books, really.”