He retired from public life some four years ago, though sources close to him report that he was in high spirits on his birthday, especially due to outspoken recognition from his friend the Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago.
Born in 1911, Sabato was an active physicist during World War II. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1940s, but an "existential crisis" in 1943 shifted him to a career in writing. Though the bulk of his work consisted of essays on science and morality, he published three successful novels from 1948 to 1974--a trilogy entitled The Tunnel, On Heroes and Tombs, and The Angel of Darkness. He is considered by some to be the greatest living Argentine writer.
From the Latin American Herald Tribune:
Sabato, who was born in Rojas, a small town of Buenos Aires province, in 1911, and has been quoted as saying that “art” saved him from suicide, has written three novels that deal with the psychological pressures that weigh on individuals in given situations.
The nonagenarian, who earned a doctorate in physics and worked at the prestigious Curie Institute in Paris before becoming disillusioned with science in the aftermath of World War II, also has written numerous philosophical and literary essays dealing with themes such as the dehumanizing effects of science and technology.
He became famous in 1961 with the novel “Sobre Heroes y Tumbas,” considered by many to be his masterpiece, while his final novel, titled “Abaddon, el Exterminador” (The Angel of Darkness) and published in 1974, won France’s prestigious Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book) prize in 1976.
Those two works completed a trilogy that also included his first novel, “El Tunel” (1948), a work that originally went unappreciated in his homeland but which “fascinated” French novelist Albert Camus.
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