Julio Cortázar

Born on 26 August 1914 in Ixelles, a municipality of Brussels, Belgium, while German troops occupied the city during the First World War, Julio Florencio Cortázar was the son of Argentine parents attached to the diplomatic service. The family fled to Switzerland, then to Barcelona, before settling outside Buenos Aires by 1919. His father abandoned the family when Julio was six, and the boy grew up sickly and bookish in Banfield, a southern suburb, devouring Jules Verne and spending long stretches in bed. He obtained a teaching credential at eighteen and taught secondary school in the provinces, publishing a volume of sonnets under the pseudonym Julio Denis in 1938 , a book he later repudiated entirely. In 1944, he became a professor of French literature at the University of Cuyo in Mendoza, but resigned under political pressure from Perónists in 1946. He published his first great story collection, Bestiario (1951), the same year he left Argentina for Paris, driven by dissatisfaction with the Perón government and what he saw as middle-class stagnation. He worked intermittently as a translator for UNESCO and wrote the fiction that would reshape the Latin American novel. Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) offered readers two ways to read its 155 chapters , straight through or hopscotching among them according to a prescribed sequence , and became the defining novel of the Latin American Boom. His short stories , “Axolotl,” “Blow-Up,” “The Night Face Up,” “House Taken Over” , combined the uncanny precision of Borges with a jazz musician’s feel for improvisation. He married three times, became a French citizen in 1981 while keeping his Argentine nationality, and grew increasingly political in his later years, championing the Sandinista and Cuban revolutions. He died in Paris on 12 February 1984, of leukemia, two years after the death of his third wife, Carol Dunlop.