Seven Madmen

Roberto Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in 1900, the son of a Prussian immigrant from Poznán, Poland. Brought up in the city's crowded tenement houses - the same tenements which feature in The Seven Madmen - Arlt had a deeply unhappy childhood and left home at the age of sixteen. As a journalist, Arlt described the rich and vivid life of Buenos Aires; as an inventor, he patented a method to prevent ladders in women's stockings. Arlt died suddenly of a heart attack in Buenos Aires in 1942. He was the author of the novels The Mad Toy, The Flamethrowers, Love the Enchanter and several plays.

If great means anything at all, then Arlt is surely a great writer ... he is Latin America's first truly urban novelist ... this is the power which inspired literature possesses Guardian The reader is possessed almost demonically by these characters ... an indestructible force of great literature -- Julio Cortazar Let's say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. Argentina, of course, is Israel and Buenos Aires is Jerusalem ... Arlt is quick, a risk taker, adaptable, a born survivor ... Arlt is a Russian, a character from Dostoyevsky, while Borges is an Englishman, a character from Chesterton or Shaw or Stevenson ...without doubt an important part of Argentinian and Latin American literature -- Roberto Bolano Arlt is, plain and simple, the father of the modern Argentinian novel ... he is the most important Argentinian novelist, the greatest -- Ricardo Piglia If ever anyone from these shores could be called a literary genius, his name was Roberto Arlt ... I am talking about a novelist who will be famous in time ... and who, unbelievably, is almost unknown in the world today -- Juan Carlos Onetti