The novelist and essayist Ernesto Sábato (born 1911) was one of Argentina's most challenging 20th-century intellectuals, concerned with both surrealist and real interpretations of phenomena, in real and imagined life.

Ernesto Sábato was born in Rojas, a provincial town of Buenos Aires Province, on June 24, 1911. One of 11 children of immigrant Italian parents, he received secondary and university training in La Plata, the provincial capital. Receiving a university degree in physics in 1937, he worked on a scholarship at the Joliot-Curie laboratory in Paris in 1938 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939. In 1939 he published a professional paper on his specialty, cosmic radiation. From 1940 to 1945 he taught at the University of La Plata but was forced to resign by the Perón dictatorship as politically undesirable.

As a student, Sábato had been deeply involved in protest against the corrupting military manipulation of the...