Manuel Rojas Sepúlveda was a Chilean writer and journalist.
Biography
Rojas was born in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Chilean parents. In 1899 his family returned to Santiago, but in 1903, after the father's death, the mother returned to Buenos Aires again, where he attended school until the age of eleven. In 1912, at the age of sixteen, he decided to return alone to Chile. Once he arrived to the country, he got involved with intellectuals and anarchist groups, while working in many different activities as an unskilled labourer: as house painter, electrician, agricultural worker, railroad handyman, loading ships, tailor's apprentice, cobbler, ship guard, and actor in small-time itinerant groups. Many of the situations and characters he encountered there later became part of his fictional world. He returned to Argentina in 1921 publishing his first poems there. Back in Chile, he worked intensely in his narrative production and at the same time he worked in the National Library and at the Universidad de Chile press. He married María Baeza and had three children. He joined the Los Tiempos and the Las Ultimas Noticias newspapers as a linotype operator first and ultimately worked on Santiago newspapers as a journalist, all the while also working at the Hipódromo Chile. After the death of his wife, he married again and started to travel. He received the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1957. He toured Europe, South America and the Middle East. He became a university professor of Chilean and American Literature in the US and at the Universidad de Chile. His works have as a central theme the representation of the instability, misery and marginality of the members of the working class. The development of the psychological and existential complexities of his characters established a difference between his work and prior literary movements, that were characterized by a less complex view of individuality. He died in Santiago on March 11, 1973.
Youth
He began to contribute to the anarchist journals The Buenos Aires Protest and The Battle of Santiago, where he wrote articles about politics, education, and society.
Beginnings as a writer
His first published literature was a poem, el soneto El gusano , that in 1917, appeared in the magazine, Los Diez . He belonged to a honymous group four years later, in 1921, and during his time in Mendoza formed a theater company. He published a book of poems under the name, "Poetic" in the magazine, Ideas and figures. The following year, he received his first award with his story, La laguna, which won the second prize in the contest for the Buenos Aires magazine, La Montaña . His first book of short stories, Hombres del sur , appeared in 1926. In 1928, the same year his mother died, he was hired as a librarian in the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. He also married Maria Baeza who was a professor and poet, with whom he would later have three children. The later death of his wife would be the inspiration for his poem, Deshecha Rosa. The following year, his second story book, El delincuente, came out which contained the famous, El vaso de leche, . His first novel, Lanchas en la bahía , which he wrote in 1930, came out in 1932. In 1936, he published his second novel, La Ciudad de los Césares '', his wife died, and he took over as director of the University of Chile's printing press. Years later, Rojas would declare in an interview his regret for writing this novel, for not only being bad, but also extremely fictional. "The writer is the son of his experience. A writer without experience is an unimaginable being", he insisted.
