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Arturo Uslar Pietri Biography

Arturo Uslar Pietri

(Caracas, 1906-2001) Venezuelan writer and politician.After Rómulo Gallegos, he is the Venezuelan writer who has enjoyed the most celebrity and consideration in the 20th century.His novel Las lanzas coloradas (1931), with which he became known when he was barely twenty-five years old, contributed to forging the highly Spanish-American tradition of “magical realism”.

Arturo Uslar Pietri

His parents were Arturo Uslar Santamaría, of German descent, and Helena Pietri Paúl, a descendant of Corsicans settled in the state of Sucre.His paternal great-grandfather, General Juan Uslar, fought in the War of Independence, and his maternal grandfather, General Juan Pietri, was president of the Governing Council at the beginning of the Juan Vicente Gómez regime.Both his father and grandfather were generals in the Venezuelan army.

Uslar always boasted of descending from fighters for the Independence of Venezuela and servants of the country, and he used to highlight the presence in his family trunk of an aide-de-camp of Simón Bolívar and of two presidents of Venezuela, Carlos Soublette and Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl.It is not surprising, with such a family background and the deep sense of historical and civic responsibility that his parents instilled in him since he was a child, that Arturo Uslar Pietri directed a good part of his efforts to carve out a political career.The public offices he held are legion.He was minister three times: of Education (1939-1941), of Finance (1943) and of Internal Relations (1945).He held the Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic (1941-1943) in the mandate of Isaías Medina Angarita.

This largely explains his always critical and distant attitude towards power during the long period of the Fourth Republic (1958-1998).During this period he accepted only one official position, that of representative of Venezuela to UNESCO, in Paris, in the mid-1970s.In 1983, when the debt crisis broke out and the depth of the bankruptcy was revealed for the first time The country's economic economy, did not hold his tongue to point out one of its deepest roots: "Venezuela is tired of the old and rotten record of populist promises with which it has never been able to get ahead.Populism is, in an immense proportion, the causing all the negative results that we have faced in these years ".

The prestige of Uslar Pietri in Venezuela was enormous.Their opinions on any matter were expected and, in some cases, feared.Long before entering old age he saw his works entering the curricula of schools and high schools.Every Venezuelan born in the 1950s has necessarily had to read a page by this writer.He waited in vain for the award he most coveted: the Cervantes Prize.But no other Venezuelan writer won as many prizes and awards for his narrative work as he did, including the most prestigious novel award in the Hispanic world, the Rómulo Gallegos, and he has been the only Venezuelan to receive it.

The decision of the jury for the Prince of Asturias Award, which was awarded in 1990 for the novel The visit in time , recognized Arturo Uslar Pietri as the "creator of the novel history in Latin America, whose incessant and fruitful literary activity has uniquely contributed to enliven our common language, illuminate the imagination of the New World, and enrich the cultural continuity of the Americas." One of the members of the jury, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, judged that Uslar has forged "a modern conception of the novel, offering the shadows and lights of the historical process", and that he is the precursor of a conception of literature in the that other authors are recognized, such as the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez.

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