Jorge Luis Borges

(1899 - 1986)

After living abroad in Switzerland and Spain during World War I, Jorge Luis Borges returned to his native Argentina in 1921, two years later publishing his first book of poems, Fervor of Buenos Aires. He worked at a city library for nine years in the 1930s and 1940s while writing the stories later collected in Ficciones. Suffering from deteriorating eyesight, Borges recollected the irony that “by 1955, when the revolutionary government appointed me director of the National Library, I was no longer able to read.”