José Enrique Rodó

José Enrique Rodó was born in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, in 1871, into a wealthy merchant family. When he was in his teens his father died and the family's fortunes collapsed; he had to leave school and work as a clerk in a lawyer's office and a bank, making himself a learned scholar by his own reading. At twenty-four he founded with friends the National Review of Literature and Social Sciences and made his name as a critic, and soon afterwards was appointed professor of literature at the University of Montevideo. In 1900, at twenty-nine, he published Ariel, which caused a sensation throughout the Spanish-speaking world; a generation of young Latin Americans took him as their spiritual guide. Three times elected to parliament, he grew ever more disillusioned with politics. In 1916 he went to Europe as correspondent for an Argentine magazine, fulfilling a long-held wish, and the following year died alone of illness in a hotel in Palermo, Sicily, aged forty-five.