Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Abstract

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento is little known in the United States, but he is one of Latin America's greatest men. Man of letters, educator, revolutionary, statesman, there was little in which Sarmiento did not excel. One writer has described him as “the most powerful brain America has produced,” and another has said that “America has not produced another man like him nor does Europe have in its history a personage who resembles him.” Sarmiento is the author of Facundo, one of the outstanding works in Latin American literature; he was the founder of public education in South America (he is often described as “the Horace Mann of South America”); and he was president of Argentina during the period of national unification (which has led one writer to call him, “The Abraham Lincoln of Argentina”).