The Pursuer: Julio Cortázar [graphic graphicname="TIF00039776" orient="portrait" size="A"]

Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 and raised by his mother in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Throughout his youth he developed a passion for classic literature, but he was forced because of his family's financial situation to drop out of the University of Buenos Aires after one year and become a teacher. He continued to read foreign literature and published a book of sonnets entitled Presencia (Presence) in 1938, under the pen name Julio Denis. In 1944 he took a post teaching French literature at the University of Cuyo in Mendoza. After his imprisonment for participating in demonstrations against the Argentine president Juan Perón in 1946, Cortázar resigned his teaching position and began working for a publishing company in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Cortázar completed a...