José Eustasio RiveraJosé Eustasio Rivera was born in the municipality of San Mateo (now renamed Rivera in his honour), Colombia, on 19 February, 1888, and died on 1 December, 1928 in New York. A lawyer and poet, he is best known for his major work L vorágine (The Vortex ), published in 1924 and considered one of the most important novels in Latin American literary history. Despite being born into rural poverty, he was able to study and eventually earned a doctorate in law in 1922. He was appointed secretary of the Colombian-Venezuelan Border Commission, and embarked on an expedition to the Orinoco-Amazon jungle, where he came face-to-face with the poverty of the rubber tappers and the barbarism that plagued the territory. This experience was the inspiration for the characters he would go on to describe in The Vortex, published upon his return to Bogotá in 1924. After representing Colombia at an international congress in Havana in 1928, he moved to New York with the intention of setting up a publishing house, printing a new edition of The Vortex, and getting it translated into English. That same winter, Rivera fell ill and was admitted to hospital on the verge of a coma. He died suddenly, without his illness being diagnosed. Read More Read Less