Julio Cortázar

Born Aug. 26, 1914, in Brussels. Argentine writer. A teacher by education.

Cortázar has lived in Paris since 1951. He made his literary debut in 1938. In 1949 he published his play The Kings. It was followed by the collections of short stories Bestiary (1951), End of the Game (1956), and Secret Weapons (1959). Almost all the stories contain elements of the fantastic, which are also present in the novel The Winners (1960). The novel Class Game (1963) was an example of the neo-avant-garde experimentation that occurred in Latin American literature in the 1960’s and that was also developed in his collection of essays Eighty Worlds Around a Day (1967) and in the novels 62 Model To Be Assembled (1967) and The Last Round (1969). Cortazar writes magazine articles with an anti-imperialist point of view. His main theme is the spiritual crisis of bourgeois society.