Pedro Henríquez Ureña

Who is Pedro Henríquez Ureña?

Pedro Henríquez Ureña was a Dominican philologist, literary critic, and essayist widely regarded as one of the most influential Latin American intellectuals of the early twentieth century. The son of poet and educator Salomé Ureña, he left the Dominican Republic as a young man and spent much of his life teaching and writing across the Spanish-speaking Americas, including extended periods in Mexico, where he took part in cultural and educational reform after the Mexican Revolution, as well as in Argentina and the United States, where he taught at the University of Minnesota. His scholarship focused on the history, language, and literature of Latin America, and his best-known work, Historia de la cultura en la América Hispánica, remains a foundational text in Latin American cultural history. Henríquez Ureña mentored and influenced major writers of the following generation, including the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who considered him an important teacher. He died in Buenos Aires in 1946. He is remembered as one of the great humanist scholars of the Hispanic world and a central figure in Dominican intellectual history.

Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica, "Pedro Henríquez Ureña" · Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Historia de la cultura en la América Hispánica (1947)