Jorge Luis Borges

Topics: Anglo-Argentines, Argentine essayists, Argentine librarians, Argentine poets, Argentine science fiction writers, Argentine short story writers, Argentine writers, Portuguese Argentines, Spanish-Argentines

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 14 June 1986) was an Argentine writer. His output includes short stories, essays, poetry, literary criticism, and translations. He was influenced by Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, Franz Kafka, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Schopenhauer, G. K. Chesterton, Leopoldo Lugones, and R. L. Stevenson.

Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suarez, came from an old Uruguayan family. His 1929 book Cuaderno San Martin included a poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his maternal grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army who fought against Juan Manuel de Rosas. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavon in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. He died in 1905 of pulmonary congestion in the same house in Serrano Street, Buenos Aires, where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.

Borges's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher with literary aspirations. . His father was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half British; his father's mother was British and maintained a strong spirit of English culture in Borges's home. In this home, both Spanish and English were spoken and from earliest childhood Borges was bilingual, reading Shakespeare, in English, at the age of 12. He grew up in the then somewhat poor neighborhood of Palermo, in a large house equipped with an extensive English library. The family name Borges may have been derived from the English surnames Burroughs or Burgess, analogous to the transformation of the surname Evans into Ibanez.