Hugo Wast
Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría (October 23, 1883 – March 28, 1962), best known under his pseudonym Hugo Wast, was a renowned Argentine novelist and script writer.
Born Gustavo Martínez Zuviría in Córdoba, Argentina, his family relocated to Santa Fe, and he enrolled at the University of Santa Fe, receiving a law degree in 1907. Zuviría first used the pen name "Hugo Wast" for his 1911 novel, Flor de durazno (Peach Blossom) - his first commercial success. He was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies in 1916 as a Conservative and received the National Literary Prize for his realist novel, Desierto de piedra (Stone Desert, 1925), but he was also known for his anti-semitism - established with his inflammatory Oro (Gold, 1935) - and his ideological association with French "integrisme," a Catholic nationalist doctrine associated with the National Front.[1]
He was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina in 1931, and in 1943, as Minister of Public Instruction for the newly-installed military government of General Pedro Ramírez, he reinstated religious education in public schools, thus breaking from a sixty-year secular tradition in Argentine education.[1]
A souring of relations with the Catholic Church on the part of President Juan Perón led to Wast's dismissal as National Library Director in 1954,[1] and the writer died in Buenos Aires in 1962.
[edit] Works
- Flor de durazno (1911)
- La casa de los cuervos (1916)
- Valle negro (1918)
- Desierto de Piedra (1925)
- El camino de las llamas (1930)
- El kahal (1935)
- Oro (1935)
- Juana Tabor (1942)
- 666 (1942)
