Background

Arturo Uslar Pietri was born on May 16, 1906, in Caracas, Venezuela. He was the son of General Arturo Uslar and Helena Pietri de Uslar.

His great-grandfather was a German immigrant who had fought in the wars of independence under the great Liberator, Simon Bolivar. His grandfather, another general, was Vice-President for a while, during the long dictatorship of General Juan Vicente Gomez.

Education

In 1924 Uslar Pietri studied law and political science at the Central University of Venezuela, where he obtained his doctorate in 1929.

Career

Arturo became a member of the Caracas avant-garde, publicising the latest European literary fashions in Valvula (Valve) magazine, which he founded with a group of like-minded young writers in 1928. But by 1939, after the fall of Gomez, he had been sufficiently involved in politics to become the country's youngest-ever minister of education, in the government of General Eleazar Lopez Contreras. By that time, he had spent five years in Paris, on the staff of the Venezuelan embassy, where his duties left him with plenty of time and opportunity to meet the literary giants of the day, including Paul Valery and Andre Breton.

Two years later, Uslar Pietri became a private secretary to another of Venezuela's many military presidents, General Isaias Medina Angarita, and he later served as finance and interior minister. He did his best to fill the institutional vacuum left by Gomez's idiosyncratic rule, but when Medina was overthrown by a group of young radicals in 1945, Uslar Pietri was labelled an enemy of democracy and expelled from the country. He spent the next five years in exile in New York, an interlude when he was able to concentrate on writing; he produced a novel, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories.

Once he was back in Venezuela, Pietri kept out of politics during the dictatorship of General Marcos Perez Jimenez, but returned to public life after the general's overthrow in 1958. He served three terms as senator for Caracas, and in 1963 he stood for president as an independent. Campaigning under the slogan "Arturo is the Man," Pietri did well in the capital, Caracas, where he secured 39 percent of the votes. But he lost the national contest having been caught between the two big political machines that were to dominate Venezuelan politics for the next 35 years.

Parallel to his political career, Uslar Pietri held the post of Professor of Political Economy at the Central University of Venezuela from 1937 to 1941. He also taught Hispanic American literature at Columbia University in New York from 1946 to 1947 during his exile. Throughout his career, Uslar Pietri wrote for a number of Venezuelan newspapers. By the mid-1930s he was a respected commentator on current affairs in the Caracas daily Ahora (Now).

Pietri began a syndicated column in El Nacional newspaper during the 1940s, which he kept up, almost without interruption, for half a century, and in 1969 he became the paper's editor. In 1953, when television was still in its infancy, Pietri began to present Valores Humanos (Human Values), a cultural programme that continued until 1985, and made him the country's best-known intellectual. He retired from politics in 1973, and in his later years devoted his still considerable energies to literary endeavours.

Achievements

• Uslar Pietri was one of the world’s leading Spanish-language writers and a fierce critic of political corruption in Venezuela. In all, Mr. Uslar Pietri was the author of nearly 50 books, including novels, plays, stories, essays, travelogues, poetry and collections of journalistic work. His novel Las lanzas coloradas (1931) brought him fame and was his most important contribution to Spanish American letters.
  
  In 1990 Uslar Pietri received the Spanish Principe de Asturias Award, and in 1991 he became the first Venezuelan to win the international Romulo Gallegos prize for a Spanish-language novel.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • En Busca del Nuevo Mundo

    (With a solid, transparent style, Pietri is drawing up to ...)

    1969
  • La Isla de Robinson 1981
  • Las Lanzas Coloradas 1931
  • El Camino de El Dorado 1947
  • Estación de Máscaras 1964
  • Oficio de Difuntos 1976
  • Las Nubes 1951
  • Breve Historia de la Novela Hispanoamericana 1955
  • Del Hacer y Deshacer de Venezuela 1962
  • Valores Humanos: Biografías y Evocaciones 1964
  • La Palabra Compartida 1964
  • Oraciones para Despertar 1967
  • Las Vacas Gordas y las Vacas Flacas 1968
  • Vista Desde un Punto 1971
  • Bolivariana 1972
  • La Otra América 1974
  • Fantasmas de Dos Mundos 1975
  • Educar para Venezuela 1981
  • Barrabás y Otros Relatos 1928

Politics

Uslar Pietri never tired of commenting on Venezuelan society and politics. Often, in essays or in interviews, he delivered a harsh critique of Venezuela.

Pietri was outspoken in his belief that Venezuela’s lucrative oil business had a corrupting influence on the country in general and on the government of Hugo Chávez Frías in particular. In 1936 he coined the phrase "Sembrar el Petroleo" (Sow the Oil), which became a popular political slogan. It was an exhortation to plow the oil export revenues then pouring into the country into productive investments, rather than wasting it on conspicuous consumption. The slogan was much celebrated, but nobody took much notice of what it meant.

Uslar Pietri commented despairingly in 1984 that "with this torrent of petrodollars and this craze for going on shopping sprees to Miami, we have ended up not knowing who we are like corks bobbing about on the water." Once, Uslar Pietri said historians could sum up the nation's history in nine words: Columbus discovered it; Bolívar liberated it; oil rotted it.

Mr. Uslar Pietri was similarly critical of Venezuela's current leader, Hugo Chávez, who led an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992, only to be elected president in 1998.

Views

Quotations: "I fight for Venezuelan democracy, I’ve fought for it and I will keep on fighting for it. I hope we would have a democracy worthy of its name and not the caricature that we have."

Connections

Arturo married Isabel Braun in 1939.

Father:

General Arturo Uslar

Mother:

Helena Pietri de Uslar

Wife:

Isabel Braun

colleague:

Enrique Turpin

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, TV, & Other Fields, Vol. 193 In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series brings researchers the most recent data on the worlds most-popular authors.
  2010
• Uslar Pietri: Renovador del Cuento Venezolano
  1965
• The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey In The Spanish American Novel, John S. Brushwood analyzes the twentieth-century Spanish American novel as an artistic expression of social reality.
  1975
• Visión histórica en la obra de Arturo Uslar Pietri
  1979
• Arturo Uslar Pietri: Una valoración múltiple
  2005
• Arturo Uslar Pietri: Una biografía
  2006
• El cuento hispanoamericano. Antología crítico-histórica
  1996