Borges, Jorge Luis, << BAWR hehs, HAWR hay loo EES >> (1899-1986), was an Argentine man of letters. He won international acclaim for his distinctive fictions, which were short stories with many features of the essay. In addition to his fictions, Borges’s major accomplishments were the complex beauty of his literary language, his ability to turn philosophical topics into literature, and his insights into the organization of the mind. Borges is considered the founder of the literary style called magic realism that was a major influence on Latin Amercan literature from the 1940’s into the early 2000’s.
Borges was born on Aug. 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. During the 1920’s, he founded the city’s avant-garde (experimental art movement) and was an innovative poet. He then underwent a change in outlook and spent the 1930’s writing prose while developing his approach to short stories. The collections Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949) reflected the successful results of this process. He then shifted among poetry, nonfiction, and narrative prose, producing a large and varied body of work. Of his later writings, the stories in Doctor Brodie’s Report (1970) aroused the greatest interest for their apparently plain narrations capable of being understood in different ways. His Collected Fictions was published in 1998, after his death. He died on June 14, 1986.
