Horacio Quiroga

Horacio Quiroga was born in Salto, Uruguay, in 1878, and his life was haunted by death. While he was still a baby his father was killed when his gun went off on a hunt; his stepfather, paralysed by a stroke, shot himself; and at twenty-three, while checking a duelling pistol for a friend, he accidentally shot him dead and had to leave Uruguay for Argentina. He began as a modernista poet, then joined an expedition into the tropical jungle of Misiones in north-eastern Argentina and fell under the spell of that primeval forest, where over many years he cleared land, planted, and built boats. His first wife poisoned herself in the jungle. The jungle's harshness, its diseases and the struggle of men and beasts became the main matter of his stories. Hailed as the father of the Latin American short story, he also wrote the famous Decalogue of the Perfect Short Story Writer. In 1937, learning that he had cancer, he took poison in a Buenos Aires hospital.