SOURCE: Ainsa, Fernando. “Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994): An Existential Allegory of Contemporary Man.” World Literature Today 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 501-04.

In the following essay, Ainsa traces Onetti's career and his considerable impact on Latin American writing.

Now that Juan Carlos Onetti has left us—when we had already come to believe that he was immortal—we ask ourselves, from where within a country in which narrative is traditionally polarized between rural realism and modest urban incursions did this writer emerge? What was his literary heritage? And, most important, how could he establish, based on a “territory of the imaginary,” Santa María, a fictional tradition in which a good many Uruguayan and many other Latin American writers can recognize themselves, an exclusive world that today is the inheritance of universal literature?

If going from the regional to the universal is the privilege of good literature, then in Onetti's case...