Background
Maximiliano "Max" Henríquez Ureña was bom on November 16, 1885, was exposed to an environment of cultural and intellectual ferment as a young child.
Maximiliano "Max" Henríquez Ureña was bom on November 16, 1885, was exposed to an environment of cultural and intellectual ferment as a young child.
He was educated at the Dominican Lyceum in Santo Domingo and started to write at an early age. At 15, he became the drama critic for La Lucha (The Struggle), one of the leading newspapers in the Dominican Republic. He left the Dominican Republic during in his twenties and moved to Cuba where he obtained a law degree in 1913.
While in Cuba, he became the director of La Escuela Normal de Oriente (Oriente Normal School), a teachers' college, and presided over the Ateneo de la Habana.
Henríquez also served as a career government official and diplomat. He was secretary of the presidency and secretary of education in the Dominican Republic. As a diplomat, he represented his country in the United Nations, France, Belgium and Cuba. He died in 1968.
His major scholarly interests were in the fields of Cuban and Dominican history, politics, and literature. During Iris lifetime he published dozens of books in a wide variety of literary and scholarly genres, among them: Estados Unidos y la Repúbica Dominicana (United States and the Dominican Republic; 1919), La Independencia efímera (Ephemeral Independence; 1938), Cuentos Insulares (Island Stories; 1949), Anforas (1914), Whistler y Rodin (Whistler and Rodin; 1906), Panorama histórico de la literatura dominicana (Historical Panorama of Dominican Literature; 1945), and Panorama histórico de la literatura cubana (Historical Panorama of Cuban Literature; 1963).