Roberto Arlt

Roberto Arlt (Buenos Aires, 1900–1942) was an Argentine novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist. The son of Central European immigrants who spoke German at home, he wrote in Spanish about the working-class neighbourhoods, factories and docks of Buenos Aires. Over the decades he became one of the central figures of twentieth-century Argentine literature, and his reputation was firmly re-established thanks to the critics gathered around the magazine Contorno.

His childhood was shaped by a harsh father, whom Arlt himself later described as severe and unforgiving. He was expelled from school at eight and taught himself from then on, working at a string of very different jobs: bookshop clerk, apprentice tinsmith, painter, mechanic, welder, dock worker and manager at a brickworks. Eventually he turned to journalism. His first novel, El juguete rabioso, appeared in 1926, and from 1928 he wrote his well-known "aguafuertes", short sketches of everyday life in the capital for the newspaper El Mundo.

His best-known fiction, Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas, is rough, colloquial and sometimes surreal. Its idealistic, frustrated and often unstable characters chase impossible schemes through a chaotic city. Arlt's direct style, far from the polished models of his day, was criticised in his lifetime, yet it is now seen as a decisive break with middle-class literature. In his last years he worked mainly in the theatre, with plays staged on the independent circuit, such as Trescientos millones.

He died in Buenos Aires in 1942, aged 42, from a heart attack. His reputation grew after his death. Writers such as Ricardo Piglia, César Aira and Roberto Bolaño acknowledge his influence, and he is regarded as one of the founders of the modern Argentine novel.