According to biographer Montes-Bradley, Cortázar taught in at least two high schools in Buenos Aires Province, one in the city of Chivilcoy, the other in Bolivar. He would later pursue higher education in philosophy and languages at the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, but left for financial reasons without receiving a degree. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote: 'I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elves, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's'.Ĭortázar obtained a qualification as an elementary school teacher at the age of 18. His mother, who spoke several languages and was a great reader herself, introduced her son to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. de Solá on 4 December 1963, he described this period of his life as 'full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness.' He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading.

The home in Banfield, with its back yard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories. Cortázar spent most of his childhood in Banfield, a suburb south of Buenos Aires, with his mother and younger sister. Ĭortázar's father left when Julio was six, and the family had no further contact with him. The Cortázars settled outside of Buenos Aires by the end of 1919. The family group spent the next two years in Switzerland, first in Zürich, then Geneva, before moving for a short period to Barcelona. After German troops arrived in Belgium, Cortázar and his family moved to Zürich where María Herminia's parents, Victoria Gabel and Louis Descotte (a French National), were waiting in neutral territory. Īt the time of Cortázar's birth, Belgium was occupied by the German troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II. According to biographer Miguel Herráez, his parents, Julio José Cortázar and María Herminia Descotte, were Argentine citizens, and his father was attached to the Argentine diplomatic service in Belgium. Julio Cortázar was born on 26 August 1914, in Ixelles, a municipality of Brussels, Belgium.

Julio cortazar novels