Argentine · 1914–1984
Julio Cortázar was born in Brussels, raised in Argentina, and spent much of his adult life in Paris, writing prose that played with form as seriously as jazz improvises on melody. His short stories—collected in Blow-Up and elsewhere—treat fantastic premises with deadpan logic, finding the uncanny in everyday life. Hopscotch, his masterpiece, can be read in multiple orders; the reader becomes collaborator. He was a translator of Poe and a political activist who supported the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions. His influence on the Latin American Boom and on experimental fiction generally is immense. Borges called him "the best writer Argentina has produced." Unlike Borges's cerebral constructions, Cortázar's work pulses with jazz rhythms and erotic energy, the fantastic emerging from lived sensation rather than philosophical idea.