Ricardo Güiraldes

Manuel Güiraldes, his father, later intendente (governmentally appointed mayor) of Buenos Aires,[2] was a cultured, educated man, interested in art.

Güiraldes was not a brilliant student; at the Colegio Lacordaire, the Vertiz Institute and the Instituto Libre de Segunda Enseñanza,[2] he studied both architecture and law, but never practiced either one.

He traveled to Europe in 1910 in the company of his friend Roberto Leviller, then travelled with another friend, his future brother-in-law Adán Deihl, with whom he visited Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Egypt, Japan, China, Russia, India, Ceylon, and Germany before settling in Paris, where (after his father decided he had had enough of paying the costs of his son's idleness) he stayed with the sculptor Alberto Lagos [es] (to whom he later dedicated Xaimaca), and where he decided to become a writer.

He was encouraged in his writing by his wife and by Leopoldo Lugones,[2] but when these early works did not meet with a receptive public, Güiraldes withdrew them from circulation, gathered up the unsold copies, and threw them into a well.

At the end of 1916, the couple traveled to the Pacific Ocean, to Cuba, and to Jamaica, where he wrote a "theatrical caprice" called El reloj ("The clock", never published).

At the same time, Güiraldes's writing became more accepted in his native Buenos Aires, where he became a supporter of new avant-garde writers; he was something of an elder and teacher to the Florida group.

In 1924, along with Alfredo Brandán Caraffa (1898–1978), Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Rojas Paz he founded the short-lived magazine Proa, which was not particularly successful in its home city but met with a better reception elsewhere in Latin America.

Güiraldes also co-founded the Frente Ứnico, opposed to pompierismo (the use of dry or pompous academic language in writing), and collaborated in the publication of the magazine Martín Fierro.