Roberto Arlt

Arlt grew up poor in Buenos Aires, the son of German and Italian immigrants, and left school early to cycle through odd jobs (house painter, mechanic's apprentice, bicycle-shop hand) before landing at the newspaper El Mundo, where he wrote a hugely popular daily column, Aguafuertes Porteñas, sketching the city's underside for two decades.

The Seven Madmen (1929) took that same restless, half-educated curiosity about machines, money, and conspiracy into fiction: its embezzling clerk Erdosain drifts into the orbit of the Astrologer, who is plotting to bankroll a fascist revolution through a syndicate of brothels and a poison-gas patent, Buenos Aires rendered as a paranoid, jerry-rigged machine about to seize.

He wrote for the stage in his last years, founding an experimental theater company, and died of a heart attack in Buenos Aires in 1942, his novels only fully reclaimed by critics and readers decades later.