Roberto Godofredo Christophersen Arlt was born in 1900 to immigrant parents in Buenos Aires, into a poor working-class family in which Spanish was, at best, the second language. His father, Karl or Carlos Arlt, was a glassblower from Poznañ, Prussia, now in Poland, and his mother, Ekatherine, was from Trieste, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in Italy. He had a difficult relationship with his family – in his fiction, fathers are often absent, dead or violent – and spent his formative years in the lower-class district of Flores where he experienced an unconventional education that included little formal schooling, expulsion from the armed forces, a series of semi-permanent or failed jobs, and an inten

This article in full comprises 1579 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 16 July 2008

Citation: Bollig, Ben. "Roberto Arlt". The Literary Encyclopedia. 16 July 2008.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12219, accessed 21 November 2009.]