Venezuela is a gorgeous, humid country located in northern South America. It is extremely rich in both culture and history. This is largely due because of its overwhelming diversity and language.
Venezuelan literature has been influenced heavily by its close proximity to the Caribbean as well as the Spanish conquistadors who conquered (and eventually colonized) much of South America. Indeed, the first written documents left behind by the Spaniards are considered by many to be the beginning of Venezuelan literature.
However, the first famous writer who was actually from Venezuela was Andres Bello in the 19th century. He published many well-received works, including the Castilian Grammar Intended for Use by Americans and his epic poems Las Silvas Americanas and Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida. In addition to this, he was a renowned statesman who wrote the Civil Code of Chile, later adopted by several different countries.
Another well known work of literature, the book Venezuela Heroica by Eduardo Blanco, is widely considered to be one of the first Venezuelan novels. An epic in the style of the Iliad, it presents a view of Venezuelan history in the classical romantic sense.
Other notable Venezuelan writers include: Arturo Uslar Pietri (he wrote novels such as el camino de El Dorado and La isle de Robinson and was also awarded the National Prize for Literature twice), Salvador Garmendia (El unico lugar posible, Doble fondo, and Hace mal tiempo afuera), and Romulo Gallegos, who wrote what has been described as one of the most popular Latin American novels of all time, Dona Barbara, about the war between civilization and barbarianism.
Venezuela has a long history of thought provoking, profound literature. This is due largely in part to both freedom of thought and expression as well the help of publishing companies (the four major publishing companies of Venezuela are Biblioteca Ayacucho, Ediciones Ekare, Monta Avila Editores, and El Nacional) throughout the last several centuries.
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, however, the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, a man who has exerted his heavy influence over the Venezuelan publishing industry in many ways including the fostering of an international book club, extended his control to include the regulation of what novels could be sold. He accomplished by pricing certain books as low as $2 while pricing other books, ones that the government wanted to discourage its citizens from reading, as high as $132. While this was a low blow for all lovers of freedom and literature, Venezuela continues to be a country with a rich literary past. The future may be uncertain, but one can always hope that the Venezuelan people will prevail against government changes that curtail their bottom dollar as they have in the past.
