Pedro Henríquez Ureña

Pedro Henríquez Ureña (born June 29, 1884, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic—died May 11, 1946, Buenos Aires, Argentina) was a critic, philologian, educator, and essayist, one of the most influential critic-scholars in 20th-century Latin America. Henríquez Ureña was also one of its best prose writers.

Henríquez Ureña’s father, a doctor, became president of the Dominican Republic, and his mother was a poet and teacher. After finishing his secondary education in the Dominican Republic, Henríquez Ureña went to Columbia University in New York City. He continued his studies in Cuba, Mexico, and Spain, where he was influenced by the work of the great philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal. From 1924 until his death he lived in Argentina, where he worked as a university professor, wrote for scholarly publications and newspapers, and, together with the philosopher Alejandro Korn and the Spanish scholar and critic Amado Alonso, did much for the promotion of culture. He interrupted his stay in Argentina twice. From 1931 to 1933 he was superintendent of education back home in the Dominican Republic, and during the 1940–41 academic year he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard.

Henríquez Ureña’s best-known books are Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión (1928; “Six Essays in Search of Our Expression”), about the particularities of Latin American literature; Literary Currents in Hispanic America (1945), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures; and Historia de la cultura en la América Hispánica (1947; A Concise History of Latin American Culture). These books are widely used in university courses throughout the world. He also wrote technical studies on Spanish versification, collected in his Estudios de versificación española (1961; “Studies on Spanish Versification”); Gramática castellana (1938–39), a Spanish grammar in collaboration with Amado Alonso; and an erudite study of colonial literature in Hispaniola, La cultura y las letras coloniales en Santo Domingo (1936; “Colonial Culture and Literature in Hispaniola”).

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