Ricardo Güiraldes
1886–1927
Biography
Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927) was an Argentine novelist and poet from a wealthy family of landowners in Buenos Aires. He spent part of his childhood on the family estate at San Antonio de Areco, a country town in the pampas, and there he came into contact with the gauchos whose way of life became the subject of his best work. French was his first language, because the family lived in Paris when he was small, and French literature shaped his tastes for the rest of his life. He studied architecture and law without practising either, and he made several unsuccessful attempts at business. Only after years of travel in Europe and Asia, and a stay in Paris, did he decide to become a writer.
His first books appeared in 1915: a volume of verse, and a set of stories about country life in which violence and hard living are never far off. His novel Raucho (1917) and the travel story Xaimaca (1923) followed. His masterpiece, Don Segundo Sombra, was finished in March 1926 and published that year. Its central figure is a gaucho named Segundo Ramírez, whom Güiraldes had known on the ranch as a young man. The story is narrated by a boy who grows up on a cattle estate and comes under the influence of the older gaucho. Harriet de Onís's English translation of 1935 helped the novel reach readers far beyond the Spanish-speaking world.
In Buenos Aires during the 1920s he supported the new avant-garde writers, and in 1924 he was one of the founders, with Jorge Luis Borges and others, of the short-lived magazine Proa. He fell ill in France and died in Paris in October 1927. Don Segundo Sombra is the book on this site, and it is generally regarded as one of the classic novels of Argentine literature, the work by which he is best remembered.
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Books
Don Segundo Sombra
by Ricardo Güiraldes
Fabio, an unwanted boy of the Argentine pampa, joins the old gaucho Don Segundo Sombra and learns his trade, his code and his silence on the long cattle drives. Güiraldes's classic is the portrait of a vanishing way of life as it passes down to a new generation. This book uses…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.