The Aleph (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, one of Argentina's most famous cities. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer; it was in his father's large library that the young "Georgie" (as he was called) discovered his love of reading. When Borges was a young boy, his family moved to Palermo, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Surprisingly, Borges did not begin attending school until he was nine years old. Because of the fear of tuberculosis, which was being transmitted at a deadly rate among schoolchildren, his mother, his English grandmother, and an English governess tutored him. Both English and Spanish were spoken in the Borges house, and many of Borges's favorite authors were ones who wrote in English. H. G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were some of the authors he discovered in his youth for whom he held a lifelong enthusiasm. The first book he ever read from start to finish was Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In 1914, Borges traveled through Europe with his family. The outbreak of World War I forced them to stay for some time in Geneva, Switzerland, where Borges finished his secondary education. In 1919, he traveled to Spain and found himself one of the members of the Ultraists, a number of writers contributing to a vaguely defined literary movement that aimed to renew literature through radical techniques. As Borges explains in his An Autobiographical Essay, however, literature was "a branch of the arts of which they knew nothing whatever." Before leaving Spain in 1921, Borges published his first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," in the magazine Grecia.

Upon returning to Buenos Aires in 1921, Borges collaborated on the magazine Prisma, notable for its unusual method of delivery — it was pasted, mural-style, on the walls of the city. The next ten or so years saw Borges publishing a number of books, both collections of poetry and essays. His poetry collections include 1923's Fervor of Buenos Aires, 1925's Moon Across the Way, and 1929's San Martin Copybook. His essay collections were 1925's Inquisitions, 1926's The Measure of My Hope, 1928's The Language of the Argentines, 1930s Evaristo Carriego and 1932's Discussion. In 1935, Borges published his first attempt at prose fiction, A Universal History of Infamy. Two years later, he took a librarian's post at a small municipal Buenos Aires library.

During subsequent years, Borges remained in Argentina and perfected the techniques for his short, puzzling stories. In 1941, a collection of stories, The Garden of Forking Paths, was published to great acclaim. When Borges was not awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1942, the influential journal Sur devoted a special issue to protesting the award committee's decision. In 1944, Ficciones, one of his most popular and important collections, was published.

Despite his status, he was removed from his librarian's post in 1946 for political reasons. With the 1955 overthrow of the Perón government, he was appointed Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. His reputation now confirmed, Borges enjoyed a life of travel, lecturing, honorary degrees, and worldwide recognition. In 1961, he shared the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett and lectured on Argentine literature at the University of Texas. The year 1962 saw Borges's first two English publications: the translation of Ficciones and Labyrinths, an anthology of stories, essays, and poems. As his fame grew, his eyesight worsened, and by 1964 he was totally blind. However, this did not affect his prolific output and he continued publishing books of verse, essays, lectures, and stories until his death (from liver cancer) on June 14, 1986.