Horacio Quiroga

Horacio Quiroga was a Uruguayan writer of short stories, poems and plays, born in Salto in 1878 and dead by his own hand in Buenos Aires in 1937. He began as a young poet in the circles of Montevideo, drawn to Edgar Allan Poe and the poetry of Leopoldo Lugones, and in 1902 moved across the Río de la Plata to Argentina. A journey with Lugones to the Jesuit ruins of Misiones left him with a lasting attachment to the jungle, and it became the setting of the stories that made his name, in which people struggle against a hostile natural world. His tales of madness, fear and hallucination, among them the horror story The Feather Pillow, show the influence of Poe, while his stories for children and his Decalogue of the Perfect Storyteller reveal a concern with craft. His only play, Las sacrificadas, appeared in 1920, and later writers including Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar looked to him as a forerunner.