An essayist, critic, novelist, journalist, professor, and orator, as well as a poet, Luis Palés Matos was the initiator of Afro-Antillean poetry in his native Puerto Rico and in Latin America at large. The poems in his first collection, Azaleas (1915), have close affinities with the Modernista trend; some years later, as part of the Vanguard, he and the writer José Isaac de Diego Padró founded the movement known as Diepalismo--a name made up by combining the first three letters of the last names of its two creators. Matos is best known, however, for his invention of the Negrismo (negritude) literary style, which uses the rhythms, language, and sounds of the African heritage.

Palés Matos was born on 20 March 1898 in Guayama, a village on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, to Vicente Palés Anés, a professor of French, and...