José Eustasio Rivera

José Eustasio Rivera (February 19, 1888 - December 1, 1928) was a Colombian politician, writer and lawyer.

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He was born in the town of San Mateo (now called Rivera after him), near the city of Neiva, south of Bogota. He went to several schools in his youth years, and obtained a scholarship to attend the Normal School for Teachers (Escuela Normal de Instructores). After graduating in 1908, in 1909 he started a job as a school inspector in the city of Ibague.

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In 1910 he traveled to Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, and enrolled in Law School at the National University in 1912. He graduated in 1917 and started a career in public office. After a failed attempt to be elected for the senate, he worked in the Colombian delegation to determine the limits with Venezuela, traveling to the Casanare region in 1922.

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Disappointed with the lack of resources offered by his government for his trip, he abandoned the commission and continued traveling on his own. He would later rejoin the commission, but before that he went to Brazil, where he became acquainted with the work of important Brazilian writers of his time, particularly Euclides da Cunha.

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In this trip he became familiar with life in the Colombian plains and with problems related to the extraction of rubber in the Amazon jungle, a matter that would be central in his major work, La vorágine (1924) (translated as The Vortex), now considered one of the most important novels in Latin American literary history. To write this novel he read extensively about the situation of rubber workers in the Amazon basin.

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Besides La vorágine, he published a book of sonnets, Tierra de promisión, to wide praise, in 1921.

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He also held diplomatic posts in Mexico (1921), Peru (1924), and Cuba (1928).

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After the success of his novel, he was elected, in 1925, as a member for the Investigative Commission for Exterior Relations and Colonization. He also published several articles in newspapers in Colombia. In this pieces, he criticized irregularities in government contracts, and denounced the abandonment of the rubber areas of Colombia and the mistreatment of workers. He also publicly defended his novel, which had been criticized by some Colombian literary critics as being too poetic. This criticism would be largely silenced by the wide praise the novel was receiving everywhere else.

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In 1928 he traveled to New York, where he was to negotiate the translation of La vorágine and a film adaptation that was never undertaken. He also gave a series of lectures in Columbia University. He became seriously ill in this city, and was taken to the Polyclinic Hospital, where he would die alone and away from his homeland in 1928, at the age of 40.

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José Eustasio Rivera related Images and Photos (experimental)

The Sunset at Yanagishima a Restaurant on a River a Woman with a Child on Her Back	An Extensive Landscape with Figures and Cattle by a River a Town Beyond 1845	Mariano Rivera Last Pitch at Yankee Stadium 2008	Mariano Rivera & Robinson Cano Game Six of the 2009 MLB World Series Celebration
MLB Series 28 Mariano Rivera 3 Action Figure	Actor Cantinflas Visiting Diego Rivera in His Studio	Jorge Posada Mariano Rivera Derek Jeter & Andy Pettitte Final Game At Yankee Stadium 2008	Claude Rich and Marie-José Nat: La Française et L'Amour 1960
Nadja Tiller José Luis de Villalonga and Pierre Brasseur: L'Affaire Nina B. 1961	MLB Playmakers Series 2 Mariano Rivera Action Figure	Andy Pettitte Jorge Posada Derek Jeter & Mariano Rivera Game Six of the 2009 MLB World Series	Jean Gabin Roger Dumas and Marie-José Nat: Rue Des Prairies 1959