Heiremans, Luis Alberto (1928–1964)

Luis Alberto Heiremans (b. 14 July 1928; d. 25 October 1964), Chilean dramatist and writer. With the Chileans Egon Wolff and Jorge Díaz, Heiremans shared international renown as a dramatist. He was an outstanding writer of his country's Generation of '50. He was an active member of the movement that began in the 1940s to reform drama in the university, which has had a great effect on the Latin American stage.

Aside from his highly praised brief narratives, collected in Los mejores cuentos de Luis Alberto Heiremans (1966), the critical world has identified three phases of his work. Outstanding in the initial phase is Moscas sobre el mármol (1958). The transitional phase includes Los güenos versos (1958), Sigue la estrella (1958), and La ronda de la buena nueva (1961), and the mature phase includes Buenaventura (1961), and his exceptional trilogy Versos de ciego (1961), El abanderado (1962), and El Tony chico (1964). His sensibility tended toward the existentialist, and he went beyond traditional literary realism. His works developed a poetic theater that symbolically codifies, sometimes through certain biblical correlations, the elements of custom and folklore in Chile, with the effect of making them universal.

See alsoTheater .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grinor Rojo, "Luis Alberto Heiremans," in Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu, (1989).

Additional Bibliography

Hurtado, María de la Luz. Teatro chileno y modernidad: identidad y crisis social. Irvine: Ediciones de Gestos, 1997.

Thomas Dublé, Eduardo. La poética teatral de Luis Alberto Heiremans. Chile: Red Internacional del Libro, 1986.

                                     Luis Correa-DÍaz