Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born on August 24, 1899, to a well-educated middle-class family in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His mother was from a Uruguayan family of Spanish origin, while his father was of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent. Jorge Luis Borges demonstrated an aptitude for literature at an early age, translating a collection of children’s stories by Oscar Wilde into Spanish at age 10. His family was devoted to reading and writing; they lived in a large house with over 1,000 English-language volumes in their library.

The Borges family moved to Europe when Jorge was 14 and lived in a number of different countries for the next decade, returning to Argentina in 1921. He lived in Argentina for the remainder of his life, working as a writer for various literary magazines and founding a few journals himself. He also became interested in the philosophy of existentialism and began to explore existential questions in his writing, composing a number of stories exploring labyrinths, paradoxes, and impossible or fantastic events.

On Christmas Eve in 1938, Borges experienced a severe head injury and nearly died of infection during his treatment. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” was written during his period of recovery as a test of whether his creativity as a writer had survived.