This is the first book-length biography of Andrés Bello, the nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual, to appear in English. Bello was also a poet, a literary critic, and an influential statesman whose contributions to nation-building and Spanish American identity are widely recognized across the region. This work provides a comprehensive interpretation of Bello's work, gives an account of Bello's life based on new information from archives in four countries, and sheds new light on this critical period in Latin American history.