by Symbolism. He was also the author of the incredibly dense and rich historical novel La Guerra Gaucha (1905). He was an impassioned journalist, polemicist and public speaker who at first was a Socialist, later a conservative/traditionalist and finally a supporter of Fascism and as such an inspiration for a group of rightist intellectuals such as Juan Carulla and Rodolfo Irazusta. Leopoldo Lugones went to Europe in 1906, 1911, 1913 and in 1930, in which latter year he supported the coup d'état against the aging Radical party president, Hipólito Yrigoyen. Between 1924 and 1931, Lugones took part in the works of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. On February 18, 1938, the despairing and disillusioned Lugones committed suicide by taking a mixture of whisky and cyanide while staying at the river resort of El Tigre in Buenos Aires. Political frustration has been the most widely cited cause of his suicide. Nevertheless, recent publications in Argentina have shed light on another possible motivation: Lugones was very enamored of a girl he met at one of his lectures in the university. He maintained a passionate and emotional relationship with her until, discovered and pressured by his son, he was forced to leave her, causing in him a depressive decline that would end his life. His descendants have had similarly tragic fates. It is believed that his son Polo, the chief of police during Uriburu's dictatorship, was the creator of the picana and the one who introduced it as a method of torture. Polo Lugones committed suicide in 1971. Polo's younger daughter, Susana "Pirí" Lugones, was detained and disappeared in December 1977 as a victim of the Dirty War. His older daughter, Carmen, whom he called Babú, is still alive. One of Pirí's sons, Alejandro, committed suicide, like his great-grandfather, in Tigre. This comprises Lugones' tragic familial fate, curiously similar to that of Horacio Quiroga's, himself a friend and admirer of Leopoldo Lugones. Poetry Las montañas del oro (The mountains of Gold) (1897) Los crepúsculos del jardín (The twilight of the garden) (1905) Lunario sentimental (Lunario sentimental) (1909) Odas seculares (Secular Odes) (1910) El libro fiel (The faithful book) (1912) El libro de los paisajes (The book of landscapes) (1917) Las horas doradas (The golden hours) (1922) Romances del río seco (Romances Seco River) (posthumously, 1939) Short stories Strange Forces (Las fuerzas extrañas) (1906) Cuentos fatales (1926) Yzur