Horacio Quiroga

Born Dec. 31, 1878, in Salta; died Feb. 19, 1937, in Buenos Aires. Uruguayan writer.

Quiroga spent almost his entire life in Argentina. His first collection of verses, The Coral Reefs (1901), was influenced by French modernist poets of the early 20th century. His subsequent works were influenced by E. Poe. The collections Stories of Love, Madness, and Death (1917), Stories of the Jungle (1918; Russian translation, 1957), The Savage (1920), Anaconda (1921; Russian translation, 1960), The Exiles (1926), and On the Other Side (1935) contain many realistic short stories and tales about nature, which the author depicted as a force that is tragically hostile to man. Quiroga also dealt with themes of the fantastic, “that which cannot be grasped by the mind,” and pathological psychology. Many of his stories are permeated by pessimism and fatalism.