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Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born on August 24, 1899, to a well-educated middle-class family in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His mother was from a Uruguayan family of Spanish origin, while his father was of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent. Jorge Luis Borges demonstrated an aptitude for literature at an early age, translating a collection of children’s stories by Oscar Wilde into Spanish at age 10. His family was devoted to reading and writing; they lived in a large house with over 1,000 English-language volumes in their library.
The Borges family moved to Europe when Jorge was 14 and lived in a number of different countries for the next decade, returning to Argentina in 1921. He lived in Argentina for the remainder of his life, working as a writer for various literary magazines and founding a few journals himself. He also became interested in the philosophy of existentialism and began to explore existential questions in his writing, composing a number of stories exploring labyrinths, paradoxes, and impossible or fantastic events.
On Christmas Eve in 1938, Borges experienced a severe head injury and nearly died of infection during his treatment. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was written during his period of recovery as a test of whether his creativity as a writer had survived.
By Jorge Luis Borges
Borges and I
Jorge Luis Borges
Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges
In Praise of Darkness
Jorge Luis Borges
The Aleph
Jorge Luis Borges
The Aleph and Other Stories
Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of Sand
Jorge Luis Borges
The Circular Ruins
Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths
Jorge Luis Borges
The Library of Babel
Jorge Luis Borges