Recollections of a Provincial Past is the best known of several autobiographies by 19th century Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Local history books describe him as the second of three founding presidents of the Argentine nation. He remains one of Latin America's most influential writers as wellas one of its more controversial and contested political figures.
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) was Argentina's leading writer, educator, and politician of the nineteenth century, and served as President from 1868 to 1874. Of his several autobiographies, the best-known Recollections of a Provincial Past is one of the indisputable classics of Spanish American literature, as well as one of the earliest autobiographies written in the Americas in Spanish. Written in exile in 1850, the memoirs describe his childhood and adolescence in an Andean province whose customs were still those of a colony. Sarmiento presents his life as the triumph of civilization over barbarism; looking back on his youth, he measures his wealth and strength by the accumulation of enriching personal and political experiences. He compares himself to the newly independent Argentina, claiming to be a historically representative individual whose trajectory serves to illuminate contemporary South America.
