Manuel Puig was born on December 28, 1932, in General Villegas, Argentina. An Argentine citizen writing in Spanish, he was educated at the University of Buenos Aires, a formation that preceded a career conducted across several creative forms and, in time, across borders that took him far from the country of his birth.

He worked as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker, and his activism was also a defining aspect of his public life. His first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth, appeared in 1968, followed a year later by Boquitas pintadas, published in English as Heartbreak Tango, in 1969. These two novels established him as a writer working in Spanish whose reach extended well beyond the Argentine literary scene.

El beso de la mujer araña, published in 1976, proved to be among his most enduring works. Its afterlife extended well past its initial publication: a film adaptation was released in 1985, and a Broadway musical based on the novel followed in 1993, three years after Puig's death. That the novel generated work in two further forms — cinema and the stage — attests to the scope of its reception across different media and audiences.

Manuel Puig died on July 22, 1990, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He had been born in one Argentine city and died in a Mexican one, a span that traces the movement of a life lived across national boundaries. The Broadway musical drawn from El beso de la mujer araña opened in 1993, after his death, a reminder that the work he produced continued to find new audiences and new forms beyond the years he had to shape it himself.