Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was a Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer. He wrote stories which used the supernatural and the bizarre and excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states. He was an obsessive reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, and was attracted to topics covering the most intriguing aspects of nature, often tinged with horror, disease, insanity and human suffering. Many of his stories belong to this movement, embodied in his work Tales of Love, Madness and Death. His influence can be seen in the Latin American magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar. He committed suicide, due to the extreme pain of advanced prostate cancer, by drinking cyanide in 1937.