Background
Pedro Henríquez Ureña was born on June 29, 1884 in Santo Domingo. Son of Dr. Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal and Salomé Ureña de Henríquez.
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Pedro Henríquez Ureña was born on June 29, 1884 in Santo Domingo. Son of Dr. Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal and Salomé Ureña de Henríquez.
He completed his early education in the Dominican Republic but left in 1901 owing to the hostile political climate that permeated the island. Most of his life was spent abroad in voluntary exile. He went to New York, where he attended Columbia University and pursued studies in languages and literature. Henríquez Ureña was a gifted child with a prodigious memory and capacity to learn; he published his first book of poetry Aquí Abajo (Down Here) in 1898, when he was just 14 years old.
In 1904 Henríquez Ureña moved to Cuba, where he began his early work in Latin American literary criticism. His book Ensayos Críticos Literarios (Essays on Literary Criticism; 1905) presented some of the first truly literary criticism of the works of Latin American writers Rubén Dario and Eugenio Mana de Hostos (Anderson 1989). In 1906 he went to Mexico, where he immediately became involved with the most promising intellectuals of the time. In 1909, he was one of the founders of a literary and intellectual society known as Ateneo de la Juventud (Youth Athenaeum) and he also was a frequent contributor to Revista Moderna de Mexico (Modem Review of Mexico), a literary journal. In 1914, while still in Mexico, he also obtained a law degree.
In 1915 Henríquez Ureña left Mexico and went to the United States, where he taught in the Romance Language Department of the University of Minnesota, and where he completed a Ph.D. in 1918. His doctoral dissertation, "La versificación irregular en la poesia española" (Irregular Versification in Spanish Poetry), is still considered by many a seminal work in the field of Spanish poetry. In 1923 Henríquez Ureña moved permanently to Argentina, where he occupied a chair in Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires and helped to organize the university's Philology Institute. While in Argentina Henríquez Ureña made very important contributions to the field of philology.
A man of universal interests, Henríquez Ureña was one of the most proli IC Latin American writers, critics, and scholars. His early validation of Latin American literature by submitting Latin American authors to accepted canons of literary criticism have led to Iris recognition as one of the creators of the field of Latin American studies. Among his most important works are: Ensayos Críticos Literarios (Critical and Literary Essays; 1905), Lloras de estudio (Study Hours; 1910), El Nacimiento de Dionisios, a tragedy (The Birth of Dionysus; 1916), El libro del idioma (The Book of Language; 1927), Gramática Castellana (Castilian Grammar; 1938-1939), and Historia de la Cultura en la America Hispánica (History of Spanish American Culture; 1947, posthumous). He died in Buenos Aires in 1946 but his books remain classics in the field of Latin American literary criticism, and his Gramática Castellana continues to be a standard grammar book in many Latin American countries.
Henríquez Ureña began his intellectual career under the sway of positivism, particularly that of Auguste Comte. His reading of Kant subsequently attracted him to idealism. In his latter years he described his philosophical position as one of critical realism.
Throughout his life he remained committed to the idea that scepticism should not inhibit social action.