Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's best-known writer, was born on 24 August 1899 in a traditional old house in central Buenos Aires (not far from today's financial district) and grew up in the neighborhood of Palermo. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was the son of an Argentine military officer who had fought in the War of the Triple Alliance in Paraguay and died in an Argentine civil war, and of Frances Haslam de Borges, an English immigrant who for a time kept a boardinghouse for English-speaking schoolteachers. Jorge Guillermo Borges taught philosophy and psychology at the secondary-school level. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, was descended from a line of Uruguayan military men, and military mythology was dear to her. Raised in a partly English-speaking household, Borges and his sister, Norah Borges (later a well-known painter and the wife of the Spanish literary critic Guillermo de Torre), spent a fairly uneventful...