Which Argentine author wrote 'The Garden of Forking Paths'?

The Argentine author who wrote “The Garden of Forking Paths” is Jorge Luis Borges. The story’s original Spanish title is “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” and it was published in 1941.

The narrator, Yu Tsun, is a Chinese spy working for Germany during the First World War. While trying to communicate the location of a British artillery park, he visits Stephen Albert, a scholar researching the unfinished work of Yu Tsun’s ancestor, Ts’ui Pên.

Albert explains that the ancestor’s supposed novel and labyrinth are actually one idea: a structure in which every possible decision produces further branching futures. This treatment of time and reality made the story influential in discussions of labyrinths, hypertext, alternate histories, and the many-worlds interpretation.

Borges later included the story in “Ficciones,” published in 1944. The title can be confused with the statistical phrase “garden of forking paths,” but that modern term derives from Borges’s literary image rather than identifying another author.