Juan Carlos Onetti, a major novelist and short-story writer in Latin America, achieved international notoriety with the publication of La vida breve (1950; translated as A Brief Life, 1976), one of the most original novels of the 1950s to emerge from writers in the Río de la Plata area. In his fiction Onetti has developed an innovative point of view along with a semantic change in narrative, which, combined with his particular philosophy, has produced a new kind of existential novel in South America. His writing posits neither an ideology nor an intellectual analysis of the characters but explores a way of being that reflects a critical, distinctive attitude toward social and ethical values. In this vein, his fiction anticipated the so-called 1960s Boom in the Spanish-American novel.

Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 1 July 1909; he is the son of Carlos Onetti, a customs employee...