Jorge Luis Borges

He read and wrote with the greatest of passions. And Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest of Argentine writers, created, through a 60-year-long career, one of the most significant and enduring literary legacies of any writer of the 20th century. The reach of his poetry, his stories, and his essays was global. His works came to be read throughout the world, even prior to becoming an elderly statesman-like writer. The result was a legacy of written art that often defies categorization, or even accurate description. Yet through his work, he managed to bring the literature of other places and other centuries under one canopy, an umbrella of modern writing that will, one suspects, withstand the scrutiny of centuries to come.