José Martí

Prison at sixteen. Exile after that. Then he tried to write a country into being. Havana, Spain, Mexico, New York: journalism that paid the rent, poems for a son, Versos sencillos, the essay that told Spanish America to stop copying Europe. He founded a newspaper called Patria, organized a war, and died in it. La Edad de Oro is four issues of a children’s magazine. The rest of him is a revolution in prose. The apostle is the statue. The sentences are the man.