page_title: Latin American Boom
section_title: Julio Cortázar
hierarchical_section_title: Latin American Boom / Major representatives / Julio Cortázar
caption_attribution_description: English: Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, photographed at the UNESCO gardens in Paris.
context_page_description: The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom is most closely associated with Julio Cortázar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. Influenced by European and North American Modernism, but also by the Latin American Vanguardia movement, these writers challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature. Their work is experimental and, owing to the political climate of the Latin America of the 1960s, also very political. "It is no exaggeration", critic Gerald Martin writes, "to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971."
context_section_description: Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 to Argentinian parents with whom he lived in Switzerland until moving to Buenos Aires at the age of four. Like other Boom writers, Cortázar grew to question the politics in his country: his public opposition to Juan Perón caused him to leave his professorial position at the University of Mendoza and, ultimately, led to his exile. He moved to France, where he spent most of his professional life and, in 1981, he became a French citizen. Like García Márquez, Cortázar publicly supported the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, as well as leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende and other left-wing movements like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In his fiction, however, political elements were generally muted or absent until the publication of the explicitly political novel Libro de Manuel in 1973.
  Cortázar was influenced by Borges, as well as by Edgar Allan Poe. He was perhaps the most radically experimental of all the Boom authors. His most important work, and the one that propelled him to international recognition, is the highly experimental novel Hopscotch (1963). This consists of 155 chapters, 99 of which are "expendable", which can be read in multiple orders according to the reader's predilection.
  His other works include the short story collections Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), Las armas secretas (1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966).  He also wrote novels such as Los premios (1960) and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (1967), and the unclassifiable Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962).  Cortázar died in Paris in 1984.
caption: Julio Cortázar
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