The ‘Real’ Borges is difficult to pin down; in a word, he is an enigma. Many facts are now known about his life, but others are a puzzle to decipher, and he was careful while he lived about what he would reveal. His intimate secrets might be dramatized within his fictions, but the reader would have to guess and surmise regarding autobiographical relevance. The most explicit autobiographical document that Borges wrote was his ‘Autobiographical Notes’ published in New York in 1970. That essay highlights the difficulty of pinning down the ‘real’ Borges; and we will look at examples of the sophisticated masks that his fictional personae wear. Then there will be a discussion of three well-known books about Borges's life and work: by J. M. Cohen, Edwin Williamson, and Jason Wilson. This discussion will be followed by examples of how Borges's biographical experiences lie behind some of his most well-known stories, albeit in a disguised form. Borges had a deep interest in the relationship between a writer's life and work, which lasted until the end. The partially blind protagonist of a late story, like Borges himself, has interesting views on the nature of biography; he is interested in the idea of destiny, and the possibility that Shakespeare created more vivid characters than the grey man who dreamt them.

Borges never wrote a conventional autobiography, but his ‘Autobiographical Notes’, written in collaboration with Norman Thomas di Giovanni, was published in The New Yorker in 1970; it was a literary sensation. Borges's ideal was a biography ‘in the nature of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria’; he was unhappy with the amount of documentation (dates) his Notes contains, and consequently refused permission for it to be translated into Spanish. The controversy surrounding such translations after his death is documented by

di Giovanni; he has a chapter entitled ‘Borges and His Autobiography’ in the book The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and his Work, copyrighted in 1988, two years after Borges's death.

In The Lesson of the Master, di Giovanni refers to Borges's reluctance to include any mention, in the ‘Autobiographical Notes’, of his three suppressed books of essays of the 1920s; and in fact they had an argument over this point. Borges referred to them as ‘unmentionables’.