Jorge Luis Borges
1 book analyzed
Biography
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires to a family of mixed Argentine and English ancestry. His father's library — containing thousands of volumes in English and Spanish — was the formative landscape of his childhood, and the library became the central metaphor of his life's work. He studied in Geneva during World War I, spent time in literary circles in Spain, then returned to Buenos Aires. In 1937, he took a minor position at a municipal library, where he spent nine years cataloguing books in a basement — a humiliating job for a man of his intellect, but one that fed directly into 'The Library of Babel.' He began losing his sight in his thirties due to a hereditary condition, and by the 1950s he was almost completely blind — a blind man running the National Library of Argentina, which he called 'God's splendid irony.' He never won the Nobel Prize, possibly for political reasons (he initially supported Argentina's military junta), a fact that says more about the Nobel committee than about Borges.