Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984; American Spanish) was an Argentine, nationalized French novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe.
He is considered one of the most innovative and original authors of his time, a master of history, poetic prose and short story in general and a creator of important novels that inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking the classical moulds through narratives that escaped temporal linearity.
He lived his childhood and adolescence and incipient maturity in Argentina and, after the 1950s, in Europe. He lived in Italy, Spain, and in Switzerland. In 1951, he settled in France for more than three decades and composed some of his works there.
Cortázar wrote numerous short stories, collected in such volumes as Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), and Las armas secretas (1959). Cortázar published four novels during his lifetime: Los premios (The Winners, 1960), Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), 62 Modelo para Armar (62: A Model kit, 1968), and Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel, 1973). Two other novels, El examen and Divertimento, though written before 1960, only appeared posthumously.
The open-ended structure of Hopscotch, which invites the reader to choose between a linear and a non-linear mode of reading, has been praised by other Latin American writers, including José Lezama Lima, Giannina Braschi, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Cortázar’s use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness owes much to James Joyce and other modernists, but his main influences were Surrealism, and the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz.
This last interest is reflected in the notable story El perseguidor (“The Pursuer”), which Cortázar based on the life of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker.
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