Julio Cortazar, born Jules Florencio Cortazar (American Spanish: ['xuljo kor'tasar]; August 26, 1914 - February 12, 1984), was an Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortazar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe. He has been called both a "modern master of the short story" and, by Carlos Fuentes, "the Simon Bolivar of the novel."


== Early life ==
Julio Cortazar was born on August 26, 1914, in Ixelles, a borough of Brussels, Belgium. According to biographer Miguel Herraez, his parents, Julio Jose Cortazar and Maria Herminia Descotte, were Argentine citizens, and his father was attached to the Argentine diplomatic service in Belgium.
At the time of Cortazar's birth Belgium was occupied by the German troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II. After the irruption of German troops in Belgium, Cortazar and his family moved to Zurich where Maria Herminia's parents, Victoria Gabel and Louis Descotte (a French National), were waiting in neutral territory. The family group spent the next two years in Switzerland, first in Zurich, then in Geneva, before moving for a short period to Barcelona. The Cortazars settled outside Buenos Aires by the end of 1919.
Cortazar's father deserted his wife when Julio was six, and the family had no further contact with him. Cortazar spent most of his childhood in Banfield, a suburb south of Buenos Aires, with his mother and younger sister. The home in Banfield, with its back yard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories. Despite this, in a letter to Graciela M. de Sola on December 4, 1963, he described this period of his life as "full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness." He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother, who spoke several languages and was a great reader herself, introduced her son to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortazar admired for the rest of his life. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote: "I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elves, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's."


== Education and teaching career ==

Cortazar obtained a qualification as an elementary school teacher at the age of 18. He would later pursue higher education in philosophy and languages at the University of Buenos Aires, but left for financial reasons without receiving a degree. According to biographer Montes-Bradley, Cortazar taught in at least two high schools in Buenos Aires Province, one in the city of Chivilcoy, the other in Bolivar. In 1938, using the pseudonym of Julio Denis, he self-published a volume of sonnets, Presencia, which he later repudiated, saying in a 1977 interview for Spanish television that publishing it was his only transgression to the principle of not publishing any books until he was convinced that what was written in them was what he meant to say. In 1944 he became professor of French literature at the National University of Cuyo in Mendoza, but he resigned the position in June 1946 due to political pressure from Peronists. He subsequently worked as a translator and as director of the Camara Argentina del Libro, a trade organization. In 1949 he published a play, Los Reyes (The Kings), based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.


== Years in France ==
In 1951, Cortazar emigrated to France, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, though he traveled widely. From 1952 onwards, he worked intermittently for UNESCO as a translator. He wrote most of his major works in Paris or in Saignon in the south of France, where he also maintained a home. In later years he became actively engaged in opposing abuses of human rights in Latin America, and was a supporter of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua as well as Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution and Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile.
Cortazar had three long-term romantic relationships with women. The first was with Aurora Bernardez, an Argentine translator, whom he married in 1953. They separated in 1968 when he became involved with the Lithuanian writer, editor, translator, and filmmaker Ugne Karvelis, whom he never formally married, and who reportedly stimulated Cortazar's interest in politics, although his political sensibilities had already been awakened by a visit to Cuba in 1963, the first of multiple trips that he would make to that country throughout the remainder of his life. He later married the American writer Carol Dunlop. After Dunlop's death in 1982, Aurora Bernardez accompanied Cortazar during his final illness and, in accordance with his longstanding wishes, inherited the rights to all his works.
He died in Paris in 1984 and is interred in the Cimetiere de Montparnasse. The cause of his death was reported to be leukemia though some sources state that he died from AIDS as a result of receiving a blood transfusion.


== Works ==
Cortazar wrote numerous short stories, collected in such volumes as Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), and Las armas secretas (1959). In 1967, English translations by Paul Blackburn of stories selected from these volumes were published by Pantheon Books as End of the Game and Other Stories. Cortazar published four novels during his lifetime: Los premios (The Winners, 1960), Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963), 62: A Model Kit (62 Modelo para Armar, 1968), and Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel, 1973). Except for Los premios, which was translated by Elaine Kerrigan, these novels have been translated into English by Gregory Rabassa. Two other novels, El examen and Divertimiento, though written before 1960, only appeared posthumously.
The open-ended structure of Hopscotch, which invites the reader to choose between a linear and a non-linear mode of reading, has been praised by other Latin American writers, including Jose Lezama Lima, Giannina Braschi, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Cortazar's use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness owes much to James Joyce and other modernists, but his main influences were Surrealism, the French Nouveau roman and the improvisatory aesthetic of jazz. This last interest is reflected in the notable story "El perseguidor" ("The Pursuer"), which Cortazar based on the life of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker.
Cortazar also published poetry, drama, and various works of non-fiction. In the 1960s, working with the artist Jose Silva, he created two almanac-books or libros-almanaque, La vuelta al dia en ochenta mundos and Ultimo Round, which combined various texts written by Cortazar with a photographs, engravings, and other illustrations, in the manner of the almanaques del mensajero that had been widely circulated in rural Argentina during his childhood. One of his last works was a collaboration with Carol Dunlop, The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, which relates, partly in mock-heroic style, the couple's extended expedition along the autoroute from Paris to Marseille in a Volkswagen camper nicknamed Fafner. As a translator, he completed Spanish-language renderings of Robinson Crusoe, Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Memoires d'Hadrien, and the complete prose works of Edgar Allan Poe.


== Influence and legacy ==
Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup (1966) was inspired by Cortazar's story "Las babas del diablo," which in turn was based on a photograph taken by Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain during a shoot outside of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Cortazar's story "La autopista del sur" ("The Southern Thruway") influenced another film of the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard's Week End (1967). The filmmaker Manuel Antin has directed three films based on Cortazar stories, Cartas de mama, Circe, and Intimidad de los parques.
Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano cited Cortazar as a key influence on his novel The Savage Detectives: "To say that I'm permanently indebted to the work of Borges and Cortazar is obvious."
Puerto Rican novelist Giannina Braschi used Cortazar's story "Las babas del diablo" as a springboard for the chapter called "Blow-up" in her bilingual novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), which features scenes with Cortazar's characters La Maga and Rocamadour. Cortazar is mentioned and spoken highly of in Rabih Alameddine's 1998 novel, Koolaids: The Art of War.
In Buenos Aires, a school, a public library, and a square in the Palermo neighborhood carry Cortazar's name.


== Books ==
Presencia (1938)
Los reyes (1949)
El examen (1950, first published in 1985)
Bestiario (1951)
Final del juego (1956)
Las armas secretas (1959)
Los premios (The Winners) (1960)
Historias de cronopios y de famas (1962)
Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)
Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966)
Blow-up and Other Stories (1968); a compilation of stories from Bestiario, Final del juego, and Las armas secretas, in an English-language translation.
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (La vuelta al dia en ochenta mundos) (1967)
62: A Model Kit (62/modelo para armar) (1968)
Last Round (Ultimo Round) (1969)
Prosa del Observatorio (1972)
Libro de Manuel (1973)
Octaedro (1974)
Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (1975)
Alguien anda por ahi (1977)
Territorios (1978)
Un tal Lucas (1979)
Queremos tanto a Glenda (1980)
Deshoras (1982)
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Los autonautas de la cosmopista) (1983)
Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce (1983)
Divertimento (1986)
Diary of Andres Fava (Diario de Andres Fava) (1995)
Adios Robinson (1995)
Save Twilight (1997)
Cartas (Three volumes, 2000; expanded version in five volumes, 2012)
Papeles inesperados (2009)
Cartas a los Jonquieres (2010)


== See also ==
Etat second
Sophie Bohdan


== References ==


== Further reading ==
English
Julio Cortazar (Modern Critical Views). Bloom, Harold, 2005
Schmidt-Cruz, Cynthia (2004). Mothers, Lovers, and Others: the short stories of Julio Cortazar. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-5955-3. 
Julio Cortazar (Bloom's Major Short Story Writers). Bloom, Harold, 2004
Weiss, Jason (2003). The Lights of Home: a century of Latin American writers in Paris. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-94013-9. 
Standish, Peter (2001). Understanding Julio Cortazar (Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature). University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-390-2. 
Questions of the Liminal in the Fiction of Julio Cortazar. Moran, Dominic, 2000
Critical Essays on Julio Cortazar. Alazraki, Jaime, 1999
Alonso, Carlos J. (1998). Julio Cortazar: new readings. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-45210-6. 
Stavans, Ilan (1996). Julio Cortazar: a study of the short fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-8293-1. 
The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett, and Cortazar. Axelrod, Mark, 1992
Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris With Uncommon Writers. Weiss, Jason, 1991
Rodriguez-Luis, Julio (1991). The Contemporary Praxis of the Fantastic: Borges and Cortazar. New York: Garland. ISBN 978-0-8153-0101-1. 
Yovanovich, Gordana (1991). Julio Cortazar's Character Mosaic: reading the longer fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-5888-1. 
Carter, E. Eugene (1986). Julio Cortazar: Life, Work and Criticism. Fredericton, Canada: York Press. ISBN 978-0-919966-52-9. 
Peavler, Terry J. (1990). Julio Cortazar. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-8257-5. 
Boldy, Steven (1980). The Novels of Julio Cortazar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23097-1. 
Spanish
Julio Cortazar. Una biografia revisada. Miguel Herraez, 2011
Discurso del Oso. children's book illustrated by Emilio Urberuaga, Libros del Zorro Rojo, 2008
Montes-Bradley, Eduardo (2005). Cortazar sin barba. Madrid: Random House Mondadori. pp. 394 Hard Cover. ISBN 84-8306-603-3. 
Imagen de Julio Cortazar. Claudio Eduardo Martyniuk, 2004
Julio Cortazar desde tres perspectivas. Luisa Valenzuela, 2002
Otra flor amarilla: antologia: homenaje a Julio Cortazar. Universidad de Guadalajara, 2002
Julio Cortazar. Cristina Peri Rossi, 2000
Julio Cortazar. Alberto Couste, 2001
Julio Cortazar. La biografia. Mario Goloboff, 1998
La mirada reciproca: estudios sobre los ultimos cuentos de Julio Cortazar. Peter Frohlicher, 1995
Hacia Cortazar: aproximaciones a su obra. Jaime Alazraki, 1994
Julio Cortazar: mundos y modos. Saul Yurkievich, 1994
Tiempo sagrado y tiempo profano en Borges y Cortazar. Zheyla Henriksen, 1992
Cortazar: el romantico en su observatorio. Rosario Ferre, 1991
Lo neofantastico en Julio Cortazar. Julia G Cruz, 1988
Los Ochenta mundos de Cortazar: ensayos. Fernando Burgos, 1987
En busca del unicornio: los cuentos de Julio Cortazar. Jaime Alazraki, 1983
Teoria y practica del cuento en los relatos de Cortazar. Carmen de Mora Valcarcel, 1982
Julio Cortazar. Pedro Lastra, 1981
Cortazar: metafisica y erotismo. Antonio Planells, 1979
Es Julio Cortazar un surrealista?. Evelyn Picon Garfield, 1975
Estudios sobre los cuentos de Julio Cortazar. David Lagmanovich, 1975
Cortazar y Carpentier. Mercedes Rein, 1974
Los mundos de Julio Cortazar. Malva E Filer, 1970


== Filmography ==
La Cifra Impar, 1960. Feature film by Manuel Antin, based on "Letters from Mother".
Circe, 1963. Feature film by Manuel Antin, based on "Circe". Script by Manuel Antin and Julio Cortazar.
El Perseguidor, 1963. Feature film by Osias Wilenski, based on "El perseguidor".
Intimidad de los Parques, 1965. Feature film by Manuel Antin.
Blow Up, 1966. Feature film by Michelangelo Antonioni, based on "Las Babas del diablo".
Cortazar, 1994. Documentary directed by Tristan Bauer.
Cortazar, apuntes para un documental, documentary. Eduardo Montes-Bradley (Director), Soledad Liendo (Producer). Theatrical release 2002. DVD Release 2007.
Graffiti on YouTube, 2005. Short movie based on Julio Cortazar's short story "Graffiti". Directed by Pako Gonzalez.
"Graffiti, 2006, Short movie based on Julio Cortazar's short story "Graffiti". Directed by Vano Burduli [1][2]
"Mentiras Piadosas" (released in English as Made Up Memories), 2009. Feature film by Diego Sabanes, based on the short-story "The Health of the Sick" and other short stories by Julio Cortazar.


== External links ==
 Media related to Julio Cortazar at Wikimedia Commons
Works by Julio Cortazar at Open Library
Works about Julio Cortazar in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Jason Weiss (Fall 1984). "Julio Cortazar, The Art of Fiction No. 83". Paris Review. 
Petri Liukkonen. "Julio Cortazar". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Archived from the original on 4 July 2013.
Julio Cortazar Collection (Finding Aid) - Princeton University Library Manuscripts Division
Julio Cortazar: An Argentinean Master of Anti-novel and Experimental Literature
Books and texts written by Julio Cortazar
A translated excerpt from Prose from the Observatory
Julio Cortazar interview 1979
Julio Cortazar Artist bio and exhibitions on ArtDiscover
Julio Cortazar (1968). "Testimonio Julio Cortazar" (in Spanish). 
Julio Cortazar, his readers and Paris. Photo Essay
The Library of Julio Cortazar Virtual visit to his private library.(in English and Spanish)