Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) was an Argentinian short-story writer, novelist and playwright.

Arlt was born in poverty, and, after being expelled from school at the age of eight, learned what he could about literature and life on the streets. He worked at various times as a bookstore clerk, an apprentice to a tinsmith, a painter, a mechanic, a vulcanizer, a brick factory manager and a port worker before managing to get a job on a local newspaper. Arlt's talents for polemical journalism quickly revealed themselves, and he was soon writing a controversial daily column for a national newspaper. Given his background it was natural for Arlt to become attracted to left-wing causes, and the vague (but exciting) rumours coming from Soviet Russia led him to take an interest in Marxism.

His first novel, El jugete rabioso (1926), was conventional but energetic Socialist Realism, but it was with his next novel Los siete locos (Trans. The Seven Madmen) that his genius first showed itself. Rough, brutal, colloquial and surreal it was a complete break from the polite, middle-class literature more typical of Argentinian literature (as exemplified, perhaps, by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, however innovative his work was in other respects). Los lanzallamas was the sequel, and these two novels together are probably his greatest work.

After this Arlt turned to short stories and the theatre, where he pursued his vision of bizarre, half-mad, alienated characters pursuing insane quests in an landscape of urban chaos. Worn out and exhausted by a lifetime of hard living, he died in 1942.

Since his death, Arlt has been massively influential on Argentinian literature. Perhaps the nearest analogues for his style in English literature are those who have assiduously avoided literary 'respectability' in favour of writing about the poor, the criminal and the mad: writers like William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, and Irvine Welsh spring to mind. Arlt, however, predated all of them.

Works Available in English

The Seven Madmen (1999) Serpent's Tail. ISBN 185242592X