If Edgar Allan Poe had been born in South America and traded his Baltimore attic for the Misiones jungle, he might have written something like Horacio Quiroga. The comparison is not casual — Quiroga himself acknowledged his debt to Poe, and generations of literary critics have noted the parallel: both writers obsessed with death, madness and the uncanny; both solitary figures whose personal lives were marked by tragedy so extreme it seems invented; both transformers of the short story into an art form of the first order.
Quiroga was born in Salto, Uruguay, on December 31, 1878. His city was then a frontier town on the edge of the known world — across the river lay Argentina, beyond that the vast wilderness of the interior. Death arrived early in his life and never really left.
His father died in a shooting accident when Quiroga was just a few months old. His stepfather committed suicide. His first wife took her own life. He accidentally shot and killed his closest friend. These are not metaphors. These things happened — one after another, across a life that reads like one of his own stories.
“The jungle is not the enemy. The jungle is the truth. It is in the city where men go mad.” — Horacio Quiroga
Quiroga escaped — or perhaps fled — to the jungle of Misiones, in northeastern Argentina, a subtropical wilderness of rivers, snakes, insects and extraordinary beauty. There he built his own house with his own hands, grew his own food, raised his children and wrote the stories that would make him immortal.
His masterpiece collection, Cuentos de la Selva (Tales of the Jungle), published in 1918, was written for children but read by everyone. His darker collections — El horror y sus cuentos, Anaconda, Los desterrados — are among the greatest works of Latin American literature, stories in which the jungle is not merely a setting but a presence: breathing, watching, indifferent and fatal.
In a story called The Feather Pillow, a parasitic creature lives hidden inside a pillow, slowly draining the life from a young bride. In The Dead Man, a farmer cuts himself on his machete and spends the last minutes of his life contemplating the indignity of dying of something so small. In Anaconda, the jungle's serpents discuss human beings with cool reptilian intelligence. These are not comfortable stories. They were never meant to be.
Quiroga's influence on Latin American literature is immense. Gabriel García Márquez acknowledged him. Jorge Luis Borges wrote about him. He is considered the father of the Latin American short story in the same way Poe is considered the father of the American one — a writer who took a form and pushed it to its absolute limit.
He died in Buenos Aires in 1937, after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, by swallowing cyanide in a hospital room. He was 58 years old. It was, in its way, a Quiroga ending: deliberate, solitary and on his own terms.
In Salto, the house where he was born still stands. It is a modest building, nothing like the jungle cabin he later built with his hands. But it is here, in this city on the river, that one of the great literary imaginations of the 20th century first opened its eyes.
If you read only one Latin American writer before visiting Salto, read Quiroga. Start with the short stories. Read them at night. Preferably alone.