Juan Carlos Onetti

Onetti left school without finishing and drifted through jobs as a doorman, salesman, and grain-company clerk in Buenos Aires and Montevideo before turning to journalism, eventually editing the Uruguayan edition of Reuters' news bulletin and, later, a cheap weekly humor magazine.

A Brief Life (1950) introduced Santa María, an invented river town he would return to for the rest of his career, its ad-man narrator escaping a dissolving marriage by dreaming up a double life inside a script for a film that will never exist. The device let Onetti fold fiction-within-fiction around his real subject: the private, unheroic defeats of people who have quietly given up.

Uruguay's 1973 military dictatorship briefly jailed him over a story-contest prize awarded to a work the junta deemed obscene; he left for Madrid on his release and never returned, dying there in 1994 after decades of increasingly reclusive, bed-bound writing.