Juan Carlos Onetti
November 13, 2006
 "Juan Carlos Onetti")
Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer, a master in fusing fantasy and realism. Onetti was awarded Uruguay's national literature prize in 1963 and Spain's prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1980. In La vida breve (1950) Onetti created the fictional port town of Santa María, which also is the setting of his later works. Onetti wrote with a mixture of comedy and sadness about the loneliness of life, absurd values, the futility of religion, and the breakdown of modern town life. Although the tone was often pessimistic, his stories were rich in imagination.
Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo of Uruguayan, Brazilian, and possibly Irish background. He never completed his secondary education and spent his first twenty years in his native Uruguay, working in odd jobs. He then moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in the early 1930s. From 1946 to 1955 Onetti edited the Vea y Lea, in Buenos Aires.
