Jorge Luis Borges is one of the seminal figures in twentieth-century literature. His influence on the art of narrative and on the very way people think about writing has been incalculable. All postwar fiction, from Garcia Marquez to Fuentes, Updike to Barth, Calvino to Eco, bears Borges's imprint - in spite of the fact that Borges did not write a single novel.

Borges: A Life is the first biography to be written in English since Borges died, and from it emerges a picture of a complex man who neither courted fame nor acknowledged the literary revolution he set in motion.

Based on firsthand research in Buenos Aires, James Woodall's portrait depicts the Borges the world never saw: the young pamphleteering poet obsessed by Walt Whitman and Argentine slang; the sexually timid intellectual falling disastrously in love just as he was writing his finest prose; the guru of Latin American letters whose sole aim in old age was domestic happiness. Casting new light on the background to the stories and the poetry, James Woodall also looks at Buenos Aires itself, a city in one of the most dramatic periods of its history.

At the center of Woodall's depiction are the two grand obsessions of Borges's life: his celibate love of women and his loathing of Argentina's most charismatic dictator, Juan Peron.