The Venezuelan humanist Andrés Bello y López (1781-1865) is generally considered to be the most complete intellectual of 19th-century Latin America.

Andrés Bello was born on Nov. 29, 1781, in Caracas into a middle-class Creole family. His early education was entrusted to Cristobal de Quesada, a Mercedarian friar, then reputedly the greatest Latinist in Venezuela, who instilled in him a great love for the Latin and Spanish classics and the Spanish-Italian school of the 19th century. They were to exercise a lifelong literary influence on him.

In 1797 he entered the University of Caracas, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1800. He then studied law and medicine there. To augment his income, he tutored his friends, the most outstanding of whom was Simón Bolívar, the future liberator of South America. Bello's financial situation, always precarious, apparently worsened, and he abandoned his...