ABSTRACT
Early Life The son of Jorge Guillermo and Leonor Alcevedo de Borges, Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires on August 24, 1899. His ancestors had been involved in Argentina's history, having fought for the country's independence and later against various dictators; these ancestors would serve as subjects for some of Borges' poems. So, too, would his childhood home in Palermo (a working-class neighborhood on the north side of Buenos Aires), with its windmill to draw water, its garden, and its trees and birds. A frail child who did not enter school until he was nine, Borges spent much time in his father's extensive library, an activity that he later called "the chief event of my life." There he read many of the works that would inform his writing, by authors such as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Miguel de Cervantes, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He read their works in English because his paternal grandmother, Frances Haslam, had come from Great Britain and "Georgie," as he was called at home, learned her language before he knew Spanish. Even Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) he first encountered in English. When he later read the original, he felt that he was reading a translation. From Haslam, he also heard stories about the Argentine frontier of the 1870's; one of these stories, about an Englishwoman abducted by Indians, provided the basis of "Historia del guerrero y la cautiva" (1949; "Story of the Warrior and the Captive," 1962).
