Argentine short-story writer, essayist, and poet — the blind librarian whose tiny fictions reorganized the 20th-century imagination around the library, the labyrinth, and the mirror. Borges never wrote a novel, arguing that what could be done in ten pages should not be done in three hundred; the stories of Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949) are, in aggregate, among the most influential bodies of short fiction in any language.
"The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Library of Babel," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "Funes, the Memorious," "The Aleph," "The South," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Borges and I" — each takes a conceit (a library containing all possible books; a map as large as the territory; an infinite forking of time into every possible branching; a word-for-word identical Quixote written in the 20th century as a different, richer novel) and develops it with the dry precision of a philosophical proof. The form is essentially Borges's invention and its influence is as wide as world literature: García Márquez, Calvino, Eco, Nabokov, Barth, every subsequent writer who has tried to make metaphysics and fiction interpenetrate, works in ground Borges cleared.
He was director of the National Library of Argentina from 1955, by which time he had gone blind ("God's splendid irony," he said, "in granting me at once eight hundred thousand books and darkness"). His politics, much criticized, were conservative and at various points complicit with the Argentine military regime; he accepted an honor from Pinochet in 1976 and later came to regret it. He never won the Nobel Prize, which is a fact about the Nobel Prize.