Manuel Puig
| Manuel Puig | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 28, 1932 General Villegas, Argentina |
| Died | July 22, 1990 (aged 57) Cuernavaca, Mexico |
| Occupation | Novelist, screenwriter |
| Nationality | Argentinian |
| Period | 1968-1990 |
| Literary movement | Postboom, Post-modernist |
Manuel Puig (born Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne) (December 28, 1932 – July 22, 1990) was an Argentine author.
Among his best-known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1968), Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango, 1969), and El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976) which was adapted into the film released in 1985, directed by the Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco; and a Broadway musical in 1993.
Puig was born in General Villegas, Buenos Aires Province. Since there was no high school in General Villegas, his parents sent him to Buenos Aires in 1946. Puig then attended Colegio Ward in Villa Sarmiento (Morón County). This is when he began to read systematically, beginning with a collection of texts by Nobel Prize winners. A classmate named Horacio, with whom Puig lived and paid rent to during his first stay in Buenos Aires introduced him to readings from the school of Psychoanalysis. The first novel that he read was The Pastoral Symphony by André Gide; he also read Hesse, Huxley, Sartre, and Mann.
Horacio also introduced Puig to European cinema. After seeing Quai des Orfèvres (1947), he decided that he wanted to be a film director. In order to do so he learned Italian, French, and German, which were considered "the new languages of cinema". He was advised to study engineering in order to specialize in Sound-on-film but did not consider this to be the right choice. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Architecture but only took classes for six months. In 1951, Puig switched to the School of Philosophy. Despite hard work, he struggled with subjects such as Latin. When he graduated, he was already working in film as a film archivist and editor in the city of Buenos Aires and later, in Italy after winning a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Buenos Aires. However, the world of Hollywood and the stars that had captivated him during his childhood now disappointed him, except for Marilyn Monroe and Gloria Swanson.
...
Wikipedia