Perón was the secretary of labor during the unpopular presidency of General Pedro Pablo Ramirez and had built up his own support through organized labor before being removed from power in October 1945. Cortázar was arrested for participating in a demonstration against president-to-be Juan Domingo Perón.

At the time, Argentina was politically as well as militarily unstable and suffered a series of military coups in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1944, he was hired to teach French literature, including surrealism (a movement in the visual arts and literature that produced fantastic images using unnatural juxtapositions and combinations and that was popular between the 1910s and 1940s), at the University of Cuyo. In 1938, he published Presence, a collection of poems, under the pseudonym Julio Denís. He then attended the University of Buenos Aires but left after a year to help with the financial situation at home by teaching high school in two towns in the province of Buenos Aires. An excellent student and voracious reader, Cortázar began writing at a young age, completing a novel by the time he was nine years old.Īfter attending school in Buenos Aires, Cortázar was certified in 1935 as a secondary and preparatory school teacher. In 1918, after the main fighting of the conflict ended, Cortázar moved with his parents to their native Argentina, where they settled in a suburb of Buenos Aires. His parents were on a business trip when they became caught up in World War I, as Belgium was invaded by Germany and occupied during the war. Works in Biographical and Historical ContextĮarly Writing Career in Buenos Aires Cortázar was born on August 26, 1914, in Brussels, Belgium, to Argentine parents, Julio José Cortázar and his wife, María Herminia Descotte de Cortázar. Much of his fiction is a reaction against the Western tradition of rationalism and is an attempt to create new ways in which literature can represent life. Like Gabriel García Márquez and other contemporary Latin American writers, Cortázar combined fantastic and often bizarre plots with commonplace events and characters.

Spanish literary innovator Julio Cortázar played a key role in the growth of twentieth-century Spanish American literature as one of the seminal figures of the “Boom,” a surge of excellence and innovation in Latin American literature during the 1950s and 1960s. Blow-Up, and Other Stories (1968) Overview

Hopscotch cortázar novel