Background
Rómulo Gallegos was born on August 2, 1884 in Caracas to Rómulo Gallegos Osío and Rita Freire Guruceaga, into a family of humble origin.
Rómulo Gallegos was born on August 2, 1884 in Caracas to Rómulo Gallegos Osío and Rita Freire Guruceaga, into a family of humble origin.
Gallegos graduated from law school in Caracas, Venezuela.
For a period of some nine months during 1948, Romulo Gallegos was the first cleanly elected president in his country's history. He began his work as a schoolteacher, writer, classical music enthusiast, and journalist in 1903. His novel Doña Bárbara was first published in 1929, and it was because of the book's criticisms of the regime of longtime dictator Juan Vicente Gómez that he was forced to flee the country.
He took refuge in Spain, where he continued to write: his acclaimed novels and Canaima (1935) date from this period. He returned to Venezuela in 1936 and was appointed Minister of Public Education. In 1937 he was elected to Congress and, in 1940–41, served as Mayor of Caracas.
In 1945, Rómulo Gallegos was involved in the coup d'état that brought Rómulo Betancourt and the "Revolutionary Government Junta" to power, in the period known as El Trienio Adecco. He took office in February 1948, but officers Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Luis Felipe Llovera Páez, threw him out of office in November in the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état. He took refuge first in Cuba and then in Mexico.
From 1960 to 1963, he was a Commissioner of the newly created Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (created on 18 August 1959), and he was also its first President (1960). He was able to return to Venezuela in 1958. He was appointed a senator for life, awarded the National Literature Prize (1958, for La doncella), and elected to the Venezuelan Academy of the Language (the correspondent agency in Venezuela of the Spanish Royal Academy).
The Rómulo Gallegos international novel prize was created in his honor in 1964, with the first award being made in 1967. Rómulo Gallegos Freire died in Caracas on 5 April 1969.
In the 1947 general election, Romulo Gallegos ran for the presidency of the republic as the Acción Democrática candidate and won in what is generally believed to be the country's first honest election. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960, largely due to the efforts of Miguel Otero Silva, and gained widespread support in Latin America, but ultimately lost out to Saint-John Perse.
(Los estudios críticos publicados en esta edición, coordin...)
(Rómulo Gallegos fue escritor, político e intelectual. Lle...)
Gallegos was married to Teotiste Arocha Egui.
