Benito Lynch

Benito Edgardo Lynch was born in La Plata. SILAS gives 2 June 1882, Britannica 1885 and library catalogues 1880, so we say the early 1880s. SILAS and Juan José Delaney both trace his descent to Patrick Lynch of Lydican, Co. Galway, the merchant born in 1715 who settled in Buenos Aires in 1749. That makes his Irish link documented, though remote, and it is the same line that leads to Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

His novels of gaucho life include Los caranchos de la Florida (1916) and El inglés de los güesos, which SILAS dates to 1922 and Britannica to 1924. Delaney notes that the latter parodies the way English people speak Spanish. The scholarship mapped by Laura Izarra and Sinéad Wall counts Lynch in a body of Irish-Argentine literature that runs from William Bulfin's Tales of the Pampas to Delaney's own fiction; he belongs to the generation that wrote in Spanish rather than English, a shift that mirrors the community's own change of language.

He died in La Plata on 23 December 1951.