Arturo Uslar Pietri

Arturo Uslar Pietri
Arturo Uslar Pietri photographed by Alejandro Toro Camacho
Born	16 May 1906(1906-05-16) Caracas
Died	26 February 2001(2001-02-26) (aged 94) Caracas
Occupation	novelist, writer
Nationality	Venezuelan
Period	1931–2001
Notable work(s)	Las Lanzas Coloradas
Signature

Arturo Uslar Pietri (Caracas, May 16 1906 - February 26 2001), was a Venezuelan intellectual, lawyer, journalist, writer, television producer and politician.

Life

Arturo Uslar Pietri was born in Caracas in a house on the Romualda to Manduca street, number 102, on May 16, 1906. He was the eldest son of the marriage between the general Arturo Uslar Santamaría and Helena Pietri Paúl. Among his ancestors are included Johan Von Uslar, a German who fought in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and then in the Venezuela's independence. Uslar Pietri was raised in that house and Maracay (Aragua), where he published some stories in teen magazines.

His childhood and teenage years were framed by the Venezuelan province: Los Teques, Maracay, Cagua. Since 1915, he met a fellow who exert significant influence on him and who would share the intellectual growth: Carlos Eduardo Frias. He studied political science at the Central University of Venezuela of the Venezuelan capital city.

There is a particular effect may explain to some extent the attitude of Arturo Uslar Pietri in his youthful days, with respect to political developments led by the university against Juan Vicente Gómez. His maternal grandfather, the doctor and general Juan Pietri, was a personal friend of the dictator. He was among those who encouraged him to act against Cipriano Castro in 1908. When Gomez took office, the general Pietri was a member of the Governing Council, first as finance minister and then as Vice-President, carrying out the responsibility of which died in 1911. Uslar was then a boy of 5 years, those ties of family and his father's military status had to weigh on the young man who in 1923 was studying political science at the Central University. His conduct in the student action was, therefore, very discreet, in particular on the protests of 1928, when he was barely a year to get his law degree. Instead, early on it was defined his literary vocation. As a high school student at the Colegio San Jose de Los Teques he began writing his first pages. As early as 1922 he had published a text, "La Lucha" (The Struggle) in Billiken. His collaborations were frequent also in El Universal and El Nuevo Diario.

Early reader modernist and symbolist writers as Eugenio de Castro, Gomez Carrillo, Rémy de Gourmont, Darío, Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, Horacio Quiroga, Valle Inclán, his initial writing was marked by these developments.

On 1925 his perspectives changed: intellectual contacts with other university students, new sources of reading, the Russian realistics: Andreyev, Gogol, especially the common book of those students: Saschko Jigouleff. Furthermore, the Revista de Occidente, published in Madrid by Ortega y Gasset, and a sort of briefing for the learning of the new aesthetic, avant-garde European literatures, Guillermo de Torre (3).

From 1925 on, there was an increasing texts production and publishing. His writing was abundant on poems only to picked them up in a book at the height of his literary career: Manoa, (1972). The first stories began to spread about the same time (4). The life of that 20 year-old writer was already defined. Before the outbreak of the small intellectual skirmish against valve, Uslar had published a dramatic text, later reprinted in the magazine: "E ultreja"(5). In 1927, a year before writing the editorial manifesto valve, he had published a theoretical essay on avant-gardism (6). The intellectual bore familiarity with principles of the Spengler's philosophy. Premiered energetic prose and the power of dialectical argumentation that has not abandoned the essayist. Gongora quoted with Goya, Whitman, Mallarmé, Wilde, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Marinetti, Cocteau, Picasso, Tzara, Huidobro. He wasn't oblivious to the problems of plastic, so palpable in all of his work. The most surprising thing is that this essay is written to refute youth views reticent on the vanguard, exposed by none other than Cesar Vallejo.

In the 1927 essay, exists and displays a precise knowledge of American literary events by Uslar Pietri. He considered Dario y Herrera and Reissig precursors of new forms, a statement that recent criticism has been corroborated. He also knew the importance that the work of José Juan Tablada had for the germinal moment of our vanguard, "whose entertainment does not pale in comparison to the Caligrammes Apollinaire." In other paragraphs recounts his familiarity with the evolution of Spanish American avant-garde, of which states: Mexican stridentism, Indian vendrinism, Silva Valdés Uruguayan nativism, Huidobro's creationism and the controversy of it with Reverdy. Such evidence in aa essay prior to the appearance of raised valve rectification. Uslar Pietri himself, has repeatedly argued that those years of his literary initiation was very little and fragmentary information managed by him and his colleagues (7). If so, not fragmentary information can be inferred that the aesthetic had not clearly connected with the Venezuelan movement was happening in other parts of the continent. The best evidence is provided by Uslar. In the polemical texts outlined above regarding valve, excluding the three who posted thoughtful notes Gabriel Espinosa, is not any other page as pithy and management concepts richest testing Uslar Pietri, produced, insist before the publication of the magazine.

With the above we believe will dissipate suspicions of bias due to personal preferences when it says Arturo Uslar Pietri was the key figure, for awareness and action, as a literary thrill represented the vanguard 1928 in Venezuela. And again, its intellectual role was in any case to match those in another field, the political field, displayed a united front capable of shaking a sleepy country with depressions of all sorts.

Between January and September 1928 Arturo Uslar Pietri fills a first indisputable intellectual level, both for his work on the scandal and controversy of valve and the appearance of his first book of short stories.

Awards

• El Nacional Best Short Story Award (1949)
• National Prize for Literature (1954 and 1982)
• National Journalism Award (1971)
• The Miguel de Cervantes Hispanic-American Journalism Award (1972)
• Prince of Asturias Award (1990)
• Légion d'honneur Grand-Croix (Grand Cross) (1990)
• Rómulo Gallegos Prize for Best Novel (1991)

Works

Novels

Arturo Uslar Pietri talks about the impact that the French Revolution had on Latin American politics at the Palace of Versailles in 1989

• (1931) Las Lanzas coloradas.
• (1947) El camino de El Dorado.
• (1962) Un retrato en la geografía.
• (1964) Estación de máscaras.
• (1976) Oficio de difuntos.
• (1981) La isla de Robinsón
• (1990) La visita en el tiempo.

Essays

• (1945) Las visiones del camino.
• (1945) Sumario de economía venezolana para alivio de estudiantes.
• (1948) Letras y hombres de Venezuela.
• (1949) De una a otra Venezuela.
• (1949) Treinta hombre y sus sombras.
• (1951) Las nubes.
• (1952) Apuntes para retratos.
• (1953) Tierra venezolana.
• (1954) Tiempo de contar.
• (1955) Pizarrón.
• (1955-56-58) Valores humanos.
• (1955) Breve historia de la novela hispanoamericana.
• (1958) Letras y hombres de Venezuela.
• (1959) Materiales para la construcción de Venezuela.
• (1962) Del hacer y deshacer de Venezuela.
• (1964) Valores humanos. Biografías y evocaciones.
• (1964) La palabra compartida. Discursos en el Parlamento (1959–1963).
• (1965) Hacia el humanismo democrático.
• (1966) Petróleo de vida o muerte.
• (1967) Oraciones para despertar.
• (1968) Las vacas gordas y las vacas flacas.
• (1969) En busca del nuevo mundo.
• (1971) Vista desde un punto.
• (1972) Bolivariana.
• (1974) La otra América.
• (1975) Camino de cuento.
• (1975) Viva voz.
• (1979) Fantasmas de dos mundos.
• (1981) Cuéntame a Venezuela.
• (1981) Educar para Venezuela.
• (1982) Fachas, fechas y fichas.
• (1983) Bolívar hoy.
• (1984) Venezuela en el petróleo.
• (1986) Medio milenio de Venezuela.
• (1986) Raíces venezolanas.
• (1986) Bello el venezolano.
• (1986) Godos, insurgentes y visionarios.
• (1990) La creación del Nuevo Mundo.
• (1992) Golpe y Estado en Venezuela.
• (1994) Del cerro de plata al camino extraviado.

Short stories

• (1928) Barrabas y otros relatos.
• (1936) Red.
• (1946) Pasos y pasajeros.
• (1949) Treinta hombres y sus sombras
• (1967) La lluvia y otros cuentos.
• (1980) Los Ganadores

Poetry

• (1973) Manoa: 1932-1972.
• (1986) El hombre que voy siendo.

Theater

• (1958) El día de Antero Alban. La Tebaida. El Dios invisible. La fuga de Miranda.
• (1960) Chuo Gil y las tejedoras. Drama en un preludio y siete tiempos.

Travel

• (1954) El otoño en Europa.
• (1960) La ciudad de nadie. El otoño en Europa. Un turista en el cercano oriente.
• (1971) La vuelta al mundo en diez trancos.
• (1975) El globo de colores.

External links

• (Spanish) Uslar Pietri at Cervantes Virtual
• (Spanish) Sembrar el Petróleo, 1936
• (Spanish) Essays by and about Uslar Pietri
• (Spanish) Fundación Casa Arturo Uslar Pietri

Persondata
Name	Uslar Pietri, Arturo
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	16 May 1906
Place of birth	Caracas
Date of death	26 February 2001
Place of death	Caracas