The Modern Novel

Biography

Ernesto Sabato is probably the best-known Argentinian novelist after Julio Cortázar. He was born in 1911 in Rojas and trained as a physicist and mathematician. He became a communist but was turned off communism by the Moscow trials shortly before he himself was to go to Russia. With a doctorate in physics he worked in the Curie Laboratory in Paris when the first uranium atom was split. He published his first novel – El túnel (The Outsider; The Tunnel) – in 1940. This is an existentialist-type novel dealing with the favorite themes of alienation and isolation and is now a classic of Latin American literature. However, it is Sobre heroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs) which can be said to be one of the great classics of Latin American literature which, using the backdrop of Argentinian history, deals with the key theme of finding meaning in a world gone mad. It is undoubtedly one of the five Latin American novels that everyone should read. (The other four? That is, indeed, the question.) While best known as a novelist, Sabato has also written many essays of a philosophical and political nature, including works critical of Peronism. He died in 2011.

Books about Ernesto Sabato

Carlos Catania: Retrato de Ernesto Sabato (in Spanish)
Julia Constenla: Sabato, el hombre : una biografía (in Spanish)
Harley Dean Oberhelman: Ernest Sabato

Other sites

Ernesto Sabato
Ernesto Sabato (in Spanish)
Ernesto Sábato (in Spanish)
Ernesto Sábato (in Spanish)
Ernesto Sábato (in Spanish)
Obituary (in Spanish)
Obituary (in Spanish)