Horacio Quiroga

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Horacio Quiroga bigraphy, stories - Uruguayan writer

Horacio Quiroga : biography

December 31, 1878 – February 19, 1937

Horacio Silvestre Quiroga Forteza (31 December 1878 – 19 February 1937) was an Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer.

He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states. His influence can be seen in the Latin American magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar.Del George, Dana (2001). The supernatural in short fiction of the Americas: the other world in the New World. Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 81. ISBN 0-313-31939-1

Biography

Early life

Horacio Quiroga was born in Salto, Uruguay, in 1878Chang-Rodríguez, R. and Filer, M. (2004). Voces de Hispanoamérica. Tercera Edición. Boston: Heinle. as the sixth child, and second son of Prudencio Quiroga and Pastora Forteza, a middle-class family. At the time of his birth, his father worked for eighteen years as head of the Vice-Consulate Argentine Break. Before Quiroga was two and a half months old, on March 14 of 1879 his father accidentally fired a gun he carried in his hand and died. Quiroga was baptized just about 3 months later in the parish of his birth town.

Training and travels

Quiroga finished school in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. He studied at the National College and also attended Polytechnic Institute of Montevideo for technical training. He demonstrated enormous interest in a variety of subjects, such as literature, chemistry, photography, mechanics, cycling and country life. He founded the Cycling Society of Salto and achieved the remarkable feat of uniting bicycle cities of Salto and Paysandu (120 km).

During this time, he worked in a repair shop and it was under the influence of the owner’s son that he became interested in philosophy. He described the man as a, "frank and passionate soldier of materialistic philosophy."

When he was 22, Quiroga put out his poetic feelers and discovered the poetry of Leopoldo Lugones and Edgar Allan Poe and would become a personal friend of the former. The discovery of these authors moved him to dabble in various schools and styles: post-romanticism, Symbolism and modernism. Armed with this background, he soon began to publish his poems in his hometown. As he continued studying, working with publications and Reform Magazine he improved his style and became well-known. caused by the parents of the young girl, who disapproved of the relationship because Quiroga wasn’t Jewish, reached a crisis and the parents separated them.

In his hometown he founded a magazine called Revista de Salto (1899). In the same year, his stepfather committed suicide by shooting himself and Quiroga found the body. With the money he received as inheritance he went on a four month trip to Paris. The trip was a failure and he came back sad and discouraged.

Consistory of the Gay Science and early works

Upon returning to his country, Quiroga gathered his friends Federico Ferrando, Alberto Brignole, July Jaureche, Fernandez Saldaña, Jose Hasd and Asdrubal Delgado, and with them founded the "Consistorio del Gay Saber" (The Consistory of The Gay Science), a literary laboratory for their experimental writing where they found new ways to express themselves and their modernist goals. In 1901, Quiroga published his first book, Los Arrecifes de Coral ("Coral Reefs"), but this achievement was overshadowed by the deaths of his two brothers, Prudencio and Pastora, who were victims of typhoid fever in Chaco. The fateful year of 1901 still held another horrible surprise for the writer: his friend Federico Ferrando, had received bad reviews from Germain Papini, a Montevideo journalist, and challenged him to a duel. Quiroga, worried about the safety of Ferrando, offered to check and clean the gun that was to be used. Unexpectedly, while inspecting the weapon, he accidentally fired off a shot that hit Ferrando in the mouth, killing him instantly. When the police arrived, Quiroga was arrested, interrogated and transferred to a correctional prison. The police investigated the unfortunate circumstances of the homicide and deemed the incident accidental, releasing Quiroga after four days of detention. He was eventually exonerated.