QUIROGA, HORACIO

born Dec. 31, 1878, Salto, Uruguay died Feb. 19, 1937, Buenos Aires Uruguayan-born short-story writer whose imaginative portrayal of the struggle of man and animal to survive in the tropical jungle earned him recognition as a master of the cuento (tale) in Spanish. After travels in Europe during his youth, Quiroga spent most of his life in Argentina, living in Buenos Aires and taking frequent trips to San Ignacio in the jungle province of Misiones, which provided the material for most of his stories. He was a journalist most of his life, briefly a teacher and a justice of the peace. Such early works as the collection of prose and verse Los arrecifes de coral (1901; The Coral Reefs) show Quiroga's imitation of then-fashionable literary devices. Soon, however, he found his own direction in the short story, influenced at first by the macabre visions of the 19th-century U.S. short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe and the jungle settings of the 19th-century English short stories of Rudyard Kipling. Exploring his view of life as an endless struggle for survival, Quiroga depicted the primitive and the savage with exotic imagery in such collections as Cuentos de la selva (1918; Stories of the Jungle, 1922) and La gallina degollada y otras cuentos (1925; The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, 1973). The work generally recognized as his masterpiece, Anaconda (1921), portrays on several levelsrealistic, philosophical, and symbolicthe battles of the snakes in the tropical jungle, the nonpoisonous anaconda and the poisonous viper. Quiroga suffered in his later years from illness and chronic depression; his later writings reflect the overwhelming sense of futility that eventually led to his suicide in a charity hospital.