Purchase and Gift, 1974-2010 (R14410)
Open for research
Bob Taylor, 2012
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 24, 1899, to Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam and his wife Leonor Acevedo Suárez. Borges grew up in a bookish and genteel household, in which memories of family history and accomplishments were strong. From his paternal grandmother Fanny Haslam he learned to speak and read English, and even as a child he had a strongly-developed interest in literature, language, and the written word generally.
In 1914, the Borges family settled in Geneva, Switzerland, where Jorge Luis and his sister Norah continued their schooling. Jorge Luis continued to read widely, learning French and German, and, in 1918, receiving the baccalaurèat from the Collège de Genève. At the end of the First World War the Borges family did not immediately return to Argentina but spent several years in Spain. In Madrid, Borges became involved in the avant garde Ultraist movement, the seeds of which he took back with him to Argentina.
In 1921, Borges began the short-lived broadsheet poetry serial publication
Throughout the 1930s Borges pursued a career in literary journalism, writing poetry, short stories, and essays. From 1938 he was a cataloger in a branch of the Biblioteca Pública de Buenos Aires, a position that, it is said, permitted him ample time to work at his career as a literary writer.
During the 1940s, Borges embarked on a career as a public speaker and teacher, while continuing with his writing. During that decade his two best-known titles,
By the 1950s, Borges's impaired vision was rapidly failing, and he was obliged to live with
his mother so she might act as his secretary. With the ouster of Perón in 1955 Borges was
named director of Argentina's Biblioteca Nacional, and as the culmination of growing regard
for his work on the international scene he was in 1961 the co-recipient (with Samuel
Beckett) of the Prix International.
Through the 1960s and beyond, as he was better-known and increasingly widely-read, Borges traveled and lectured extensively. In 1967, Borges, working with the American scholar Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, began a project of translating his works into English. The program of translation, which began with a bilingual edition entitled
His 1967 marriage to Elsa Astete Millán failed after three years and Borges turned once again to his mother as secretary. Following her death in 1975, María Kodama became Borges's secretary. In the last years of his life he bequeathed his literary properties to her, and shortly before his own death in Geneva, on 14 June 1986, Borges and Kodama were married.
Loewenstein, C. Jared.
Wall, Catharine E.
Williamson, Edwin.
The Ransom Center's collection of manuscript material created by Jorge Luis Borges represents the years 1922 to 1975 and is arranged in three series: I. Works, II. Notebooks, and III. Correspondence.
Series I. Works, 1926-1967, embodies several essays, two short stories (
Series II. Notebooks, 1949-1960 contains five notebooks used by Borges to draft imaginative works and essays, as well as to set down ideas and themes for future development. Several works by Borges that appeared in
Series III. Correspondence, 1922-1975, is small, and in it four missives from Borges to others are found. The earliest of these, from 1922, is a note written to accompany two signed presentation copies of the broadsheet
The Ransom Center holds the two signed numbers of
Significant Borges collections are found in the Colección Jorge Luis Borges of the Fundación San Telmo in Buenos Aires and in the University of Virginia Library's Special Collections Department. The former has major holdings of Borges manuscripts, and the latter collection embraces an exhaustive library of published editions.
Sound Recordings were transferred to the Ransom Center's Sound Recording collection and are
described individually in a list at the end of this finding aid and in a