His father, Karl Arlt, was from Posen (now Poznań in present-day Poland) and his mother was Ekatherine Lobstraibitzer, born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a native of Trieste and Italian speaking.

[2] For example, Remo Erdosain (a character at least partially based on Arlt's own life) often recalls his abusive father and how little if any support he would give him.

During his lifetime, however, Arlt was best known for his "Aguafuertes" ("Etchings"), the result of his contributions as a columnist - between 1928 and 1942 - to the Buenos Aires daily "El Mundo".

Arlt used these columns to comment, in his characteristically forthright and unpretentious style, on the peculiarities, hypocrisies, strangeness, and beauty of everyday life in Argentina's capital.

Arlt has been massively influential on Latin American literature, including the 1960s "Boom" generation of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez.

[4] Analogues in English literature are those who avoid literary 'respectability' by writing about the poor, the criminal and the mad: writers like William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, and Irvine Welsh.

He is widely considered to be one of the founders of the modern Argentine novel; among those contemporary writers who claim to have been influenced by Arlt are Abelardo Castillo, Ricardo Piglia and César Aira.

Although a plan to publish the two closely linked novels in the same volume initially proved unfeasible, The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers, respectively translated by Naomi Lindstrom and Larry Riley, appeared simultaneously in July 2018.