Profile of Horacio Quiroga on Famous Like Me

Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was a Uruguayan short story writer. He wrote stories which, in their use of the supernatural and the bizarre, look backward to Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, but also look forward to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez.

Biography

He had a famously miserable and unhappy life. His father, who was an Argentinian consular official, was killed accidentally in a shooting incident when Horacio was an infant. After his stepfather's death—he shot himself—Quiroga visited Paris, but soon realized that the bohemian life was not for him. He returned to South America, where he accidentally shot and killed his friend in 1902 while they were inspecting a gun. In 1904 he settled in Chaco province. He planted cotton, but the venture failed and he abandoned the project. He then taught for a while and married one of his pupils. They had one daughter, named Egle, and one son. Both of these children later killed themselves. With his family Quiroga moved to San Ignacio, Misiones, on the Paraná River, where he assumed a post of registrar. Unable to tolerate the harsh conditions, Quiroga's wife committed suicide by poisoning herself—she suffered a full week before she died.

His most famous collections are Cuentos de amor, de locura, y de muerte (1917) and Los desterrados (1926). These deal with anthropomorphic, intelligent animals, fate, a jungle that seems to be alive and bizarre coincidences: all against a backdrop of total despair. Quiroga is one now seen as one of the greatest of Uruguayan writers.

Selected works translated into English

• Horacio Quiroga The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). (ISBN 0299198340)

• Horacio Quiroga The Exiles and other Stories (University of Texas Press, 1987). (ISBN 0292720505)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Horacio Quiroga