Hugo Wast

Who was Hugo Wast?

Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría, 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 - 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, but he was also known for his anti-semitism - established with his inflammatory Oro - and his ideological association with French "integrisme," a Catholic nationalist doctrine associated with the National Front.

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.

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, and the writer died in Buenos Aires in 1962.