The Airship Daily examines the life of Horacio Quiroga.
In his work, Quiroga shows a morbid obsession with death and violence (see: “The Decapitated Chicken”), and a large part of this undoubtedly stems from his own life. The opening salvo came before he had even completed his first year of life: In 1879, his father, an official at the Argentine Consulate, was killed in a hunting accident. Years later, after Quiroga had already started publishing his own magazine called Revista de Salto, his step-father committed suicide by shooting himself; the author was the one who found the body. With his inheritance, Quiroga took himself to Paris for a few months before realizing that the Left Bank lifestyle did not suit him. Upon returning to Uruguay, his productive period began in earnest, but in 1902, while cleaning a gun, Quiroga accidentally killed his friend Federico Ferrando. Although eventually exonerated of the crime, the writer soon moved to Buenos Aires, in large part to escape the memory of his friend’s death.
