Bookatlas
1886–1927Latin America
Portrait of Ricardo Güiraldes

Ricardo Güiraldes

Argentina

Lyrical, sensuous description of pampas landscape and gaucho lore, an elegiac tone mourning a world the author already knew was gone.

Güiraldes was born into a wealthy Buenos Aires landowning family and spent much of his youth traveling (Europe, the Middle East, Asia), dabbling in Eastern philosophy and theosophy before settling into writing. He married Adelina del Carril, whose Paris circle connected him to French and Argentine literary avant-gardes of the 1920s.

He wrote Don Segundo Sombra while already ill with the Hodgkin's lymphoma that would kill him, drawing on a real gaucho foreman from his family's estate as the model for the novel's taciturn old horseman. The book appeared in 1926 to immediate acclaim.

He died in Paris the following year, at forty-one, having lived just long enough to see the novel confirmed as a landmark of Argentine literature.

Foundational Latin American Realism

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1926
    Cover of Don Segundo Sombra
    Don Segundo Sombra
    Lvl 5bildungsroman

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