Biographies. Bibliography

Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) was an Argentine writer born in Brussels and based in Paris. He wrote short stories, novels, poetry, and essays and worked as a translator. With the stories in Bestiario (1951) and the novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963), he reshaped narratives of the fantastic, turning reading into an exploration of language, chance, and everyday life.

Timeline

A childhood among books

Julio Cortázar was born on August 26, 1914, in Brussels, where his father held a position connected with Argentina’s diplomatic representation. World War I forced the family to move through several European countries before returning to Argentina in 1918. They settled in Banfield, south of Buenos Aires. After his parents separated, he grew up with his mother and his sister Ofelia, in an environment where reading played a role from an early age.

His mother encouraged this inclination and gave him books that accompanied his first explorations of the fantastic. He later attended the Escuela Normal Mariano Acosta in Buenos Aires, earning his elementary school teaching qualification in 1932 and his qualification to teach literature in 1935. He contributed to the student magazine Addenda, an outlet for his literary and artistic interests. He began studying at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, but financial difficulties led him to leave his studies to work and help support his family.

The classroom and his early writings

Teaching took him to Bolívar and then to Chivilcoy, in Buenos Aires Province. While teaching, he read French literature and wrote texts that he largely kept to himself. His first book was Presencia, a collection of sonnets published in 1938 under the pseudonym Julio Denis. These poetic beginnings went hand in hand with an interest in surrealism and a search for a narrative voice that would take longer to reach book form.

In July 1944, he moved to Mendoza to teach French literature at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. His time at the university ended amid the political conflicts surrounding the rise of Peronism, which he opposed at the time. Back in Buenos Aires, he worked at the Cámara Argentina del Libro and turned toward professional translation. In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges published Casa tomada (House Taken Over) in Los Anales de Buenos Aires; three years later came the dramatic poem Los reyes (The Kings) (1949), a retelling of the myth of the Minotaur.

Paris and the craft of storytelling

In 1951, he published Bestiario with Sudamericana and settled in Paris on a French government scholarship. The volume brought together stories in which the inexplicable intruded into familiar settings: a house, an apartment, the routines of their inhabitants. There was no need to travel to a remote universe to encounter the fantastic. In Casa tomada, included in the book, an unidentified presence forced two siblings to retreat within their own home.

In Paris, he married the translator Aurora Bernárdez in 1953 and worked as a freelance translator, including for Unesco. He translated Edgar Allan Poe and Marguerite Yourcenar, among other authors. His short fiction expanded with Final del juego (End of the Game and Other Stories) (1956) and Las armas secretas (1959). The latter included El perseguidor (The Pursuer) (1959), inspired by Charlie Parker: jazz and the experience of time moved to the center of the narrative.

His first published novel was Los premios (The Winners) (1960). Two years later, Minotauro published Historias de cronopios y de famas (Cronopios and Famas) (1962), in which he alternated short stories with instructions and brief absurd scenes. Humor took on a decisive role here: making strange the gestures that habit had rendered automatic. This playful strain did not replace his unsettling stories; it broadened the range of his writing.

Rayuela and the encounter with the Americas

In June 1963, Sudamericana published Rayuela. The novel followed Horacio Oliveira between Paris and Buenos Aires, with La Maga and his friends forming part of a search that ranged through love and discussions of art. Its formal premise was laid out from the outset: it could be read in a conventional sequence or by following the chapters in an alternative order. Reading was no longer simply a matter of following a story; it required decisions about how to connect its fragments.

The book established Cortázar as a leading figure of the Latin American Boom, alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. His correspondence with Francisco Porrúa, an editor at Sudamericana, documented the doubts and revisions that had accompanied its writing. That same year, he traveled to Cuba to serve on the jury for the Casa de las Américas prize. His encounter with the Cuban Revolution opened a period of more intense political involvement, which coexisted with his defense of the freedom to experiment in literature.

Experimentation and commitment

During the second half of the 1960s, he did not simply repeat the formula of Rayuela. He published the stories in Todos los fuegos el fuego (All Fires the Fire) (1966) and explored other ways of constructing a book in La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds) (1967), bringing together fiction, poetry, and essays. The novel 62, modelo para armar (62: A Model Kit) (1968) added to this diversity. The coexistence of genres was an enduring practice, not an exception within his work.

His commitment to Latin America took explicit form in Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel), which incorporated journalistic material into fiction and addressed political violence. Its French translation received the Premio Médicis extranjero in November 1974. Cortázar participated in the Tribunal Russell, devoted to investigating human rights violations, and supported the revolutionary projects in Cuba and Nicaragua. He denounced repression under the dictatorships of the Southern Cone; in 1981, he acquired French citizenship without relinquishing his Argentine citizenship.

Final journeys and new readings

In 1982, he set out with his wife, the writer and photographer Carol Dunlop, on a journey along the highway between Paris and Marseille. They imposed their own rules: stop at every rest area and spend the night at one of them, without leaving the highway. The experience became Los autonautas de la cosmopista (Autonauts of the Cosmoroute) (1983), written by the two of them. This time, play structured a real experience, transforming a familiar route into material for observation and writing.

In 1983, he returned to Argentina for the last time, receiving expressions of affection from his readers. He died in Paris on February 12, 1984, at the age of sixty-nine, and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. That year saw the posthumous publication of Salvo el crepúsculo (Save Twilight) (1984), which gathered a selection of his poetry and offered a way to explore writing less widely known than his stories and novels.

Later readings of Cortázar also drew on his papers and annotated books. His personal library was housed at the Fundación Juan March, where inscriptions and traces of his reading were preserved. In 2019, the Real Academia Española and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española published a commemorative edition of Rayuela. These materials make it possible to revisit both the storyteller and the reader at work behind every page.

Main works