Excerpt from The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)The narrator is talking with a friend on the phone. The friend has just told the narrator that he saw something amazing in his basement, “The Aleph”:

The narrator arrives at his friend’s home and is in the basement:

Source Citation

Borges, Jorge Luis. The Aleph and Other Stories. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York, NY, USA: Penguin,

2004. Print.

Jorge Luis BorgesThe Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was one of Latin America's most original and influential prose writers and poets. His short stories revealed him as one of the great stylists of the Spanish language.

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. A few years later his family moved to the northern suburb of Palermo, which he was to celebrate in prose and verse. He received his earliest education at home, where he learned English and read widely in his father's library of English books. When Borges was nine years of age, he began his public schooling in Palermo, and in the same year, published his first literary undertaking--a translation into Spanish of Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince."In 1914 the Borges family traveled to Europe. When World War I broke out, they settled for the duration in Switzerland where young Borges finished his formal education at the Collège in Geneva. By 1919, when the family moved on to Spain, Borges had learned several languages and had begun to write and translate poetry.

Early WorkIn Seville and Madrid he frequented literary gatherings where he absorbed the lessons of new poetical theorists of the time--especially those of Rafael Cansinos Asséns, who headed a group of writers who came to be known as "ultraists." When the family returned to Argentina in 1921, Borges rediscovered his native Buenos Aires and began to write poems dealing with his intimate feelings for the city, its past, and certain fading features of its quiet suburbs. His early poetry was reflective in tone; metaphors dominated, usual linking words were suppressed, and the humble, tranquil aspects of the city that he evoked seemed somehow contaminated by eternity.

With other young Argentine writers, Borges collaborated in the founding of new publications, in which the ultraist mode was cultivated in the New World. In 1923 his first volume of poetry, Fervor of Buenos Aires, was published, and it also made somewhat of a name for him in Spain.

In 1925 his second book of poetry, Moon across the Way, appeared, followed in 1929 by San Martin Notebook--the last new collection of his verse to appear for three decades. Borges gradually developed a keen interest in literary criticism. His critical and philosophical essays began to fill most of the volumes he published during the period 1925-1940: Inquisitions (1925), The Dimensions of My Hope (1926), The Language of the Argentines (1928), Evaristo Carriego (1930), Discussion (1932), and History of Eternity (1938).

Change in StyleIn 1938, with his father gravely ill from a heart ailment, Borges obtained an appointment in a municipal library in Buenos Aires. Before year's end, his father died. Borges, himself, came close to death from septicemia, the complication of an infected head injury.

This period of crisis produced an important change in Borges. He began to write prose fiction tales of a curious and highly original character. These pieces seemed to be philosophical essays invested with narrative qualities and tensions. Others were short stories infused with metaphorical concepts. Ten of these concise, well-executed stories were collected in Ficciones (1944). A second volume of similar tales, entitled The Aleph, was published in 1949. Borges's fame as a writer firmly rests on the narratives contained in these two books, to which other stories were added in later editions.

In 1955, following the overthrow of the Peronist regime in Argentina, Borges was named director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. In that same year his sight deteriorated to the point where he became almost totally blind.

After The Aleph, he published an important collection of essays, Other Inquisitions (1952); several collections of poetry and prose sketches, Dreamtigers (1960), In Praise of Darkness (1969), The Deep Rose (1975), and The Iron Coin (1976); and two collections of new short stories, Dr. Brodie's Report(1970) and The Book of Sand (1975). Aside from these works, Borges wrote over a dozen books in collaboration with other persons. Foremost among his collaborators was Adolfo Bioy Casares, an Argentine novelist and short-story writer, who was Borges's closest literary associate for nearly 40 years. A Viking collection of Borges's work began in 1998 with Alexander Coleman (editor),Borges's Collected Fictions and followed by Selected Poems (1999), a bilingual volume of 200 poems covering the range of Borges's work.

In 1961 Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the $10,000 International Publishers Prize, and world recognition at last began to come his way. He received countless honors and prizes. In 1970 he was the first recipient of the $25,000 Matarazzo Sobrinho Inter-American Literary Prize.Borges married Elsa Astete Millan in 1967 but was divorced in 1970. He married Maria Kodama in 1986, shortly before his death on June 14, in Geneva, Switzerland.

On March 13, 2000, the National Book Critics Circle honored Borges's memory with the criticism award for his collection "Selected Non-Fictions." The collection won praise for its sharp criticism and philosophical incisiveness. In 2011, Google celebrated Borge's 112th birthday my depicting him and his speculative fiction writing in a Google Doodle on its homepage.

Source Citation

"Jorge Luis Borges." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998.Biography in Context. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.

Juan Perón

Juan Domingo Perón Sosa was the dominant figure in Argentine politics from 1946 until his death in 1974. Closely associated with his political base among Argentina's working class, Perón's regime was a turning point in Argentine history, and his politics caused people throughout the Americas to reexamine their ideas about democracy, development, and nationalism. 

Perón became involved with nationalistic young officers—known as the Group of United Officers—who successfully overthrew the Argentine government in 1943. He soon acquired great power in the new government, beginning as secretary of labor. From this base, he assisted urban and transport workers with organization and collective bargaining. Unaccustomed to such willing assistance from government, many workers demonstrated great loyalty to Perón who, by 1944, was also vice president and minister of war. 

As Perón became more popular, other military officers sought to curb his power. Perón was arrested in 1945 and imprisoned on an island in the River Plate. It was at this juncture that his political relationship with the working class became an irresistible force in Argentine history. News of his arrest brought thousands of workers into the city of Buenos Aires, where they filled the massive Plaza de Mayo carrying banners and chanting slogans calling for the release of Perón. Such popular demonstrations were not yet common in Argentina, and the military government decided to respond by releasing Perón. On October 17, 1945, a day that would become famous in Peronist mythology, Perón appeared on the balcony of the presidential mansion overlooking the Plaza de Mayo to the jubilation of his followers. Shortly thereafter, the military thought it prudent to schedule elections. 

Once president, Perón developed the ideology of Justicialism, which called for social justice within Argentina and the economic independence and political sovereignty of the nation in world affairs. At the end of World War II, the Argentine economy was strong, and Perón was able to engage in such actions as buying out the British-built railroads, moves that were popular with the nationalists among his followers in the working class and the military. As time went on, Perón spent increasing amounts of time on military politics and the affairs of state, while his wife, known simply as Evita among her followers, coordinated government relations with the workers. Evita also brought support to Peronism by organizing the Peronist Women's Party (woman suffrage was passed in 1947) and by appealing to the poor. 

The Peróns had purged dissenting labor leaders from the movement early on, but the vast majority of workers were genuinely attracted to Perón not only for his political messages that dignified labor but for such practical advantages as trade union rights, salary increases, and benefits that came to working people, including women, as the government worked to expand the industrial sector of the economy. Perón retained the support of the military through salary increases and the loyalty of officers who believed in his nationalistic measures. The Catholic Church also supported Perón. 

In the early 1950s as the postwar economic boom began to fade, and as Argentina's agricultural sector began to falter (partly in response to Perón's economic policy), it became more difficult for the government to distribute benefits to the workers without forcing sacrifice on another social group. Under

these circumstances, the Peróns began to demand more political conformity from their followers even as they stepped up censorship and other sorts of control over the opposition. Perón's reelection in 1951 was not as clean as his election in 1946. In 1952, the death of Eva Perón was a terrible blow to the regime, which struggled to maintain the loyalty that she had been able to inspire among Argentine citizens. 

The political situation worsened as economic woes forced Perón to negotiate with the United States and the Standard Oil Company. His relations with the Catholic Church also began to deteriorate, and he was excommunicated in 1955. Both of these factors were upsetting to the right-wing military elements who overthrew Perón in the Argentine Revolution of 1955. Perón sought refuge in several Latin American countries before settling in Spain. 

The military government that took over after Perón's overthrow was no more successful than he had been in solving Argentina's economic problems. In an attempt to depoliticize the working class, the officers purged the labor unions of the entrenched Peronist leadership. This purge had the unintended consequence of bringing many younger workers to the fore, and these youthful leaders revitalized the commitment of organized labor to Peronist ideology, though it was declared illegal by the military government. 

From his villa in Spain, Perón received news and visits from all manner of labor leaders, all of whom he encouraged. In addition, other social groups who were dissatisfied with the alternating military and civilian governments in Argentina came to believe that Peronism held the solutions to the country's problems. Perón encouraged them as well. By the early 1970s, as the unending cycle of boom and bust economies undermined one government after another, even the military hard-liners came to believe that only Perón could restore unity to the Argentine population. In 1973, Perón was allowed to return to Argentina and stand in elections, which he won with his third wife, Isabel Perón, as vice president. 

Perón became president of a much different Argentina than the one he had left in 1955. The country's economic problems and social divisions had deepened and become violent. Both urban and rural guerrillas were active in kidnappings and other violent political activity, even as military counterinsurgency forces engaged in the overt abuse of human rights and paramilitary forces became active to counter the guerrillas. The labor movement had leftist elements with some ties to the guerrillas and rightist elements with ties to the paramilitary organizations. People in all of these groups looked to Perón for leadership. 

Though Perón's sympathies lay with the rightist trade union bureaucracy, his policies and personal prestige were at first enough to create an atmosphere for national cooperation. Guerrilla activity stopped and inflation went down. Perón had become an old man, however, and soon became ill, unable to attend to business full time. As the political calm began to deteriorate, Perón died on July 1, 1974. He left behind a complicated and violent political situation, and his widow-cum-president, Isabel, was completely unsuited to leadership of any kind.

 MLA

"Juan Perón." World History: The Modern Era. ABC-CLIO, 2015. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.