Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Sarmiento grew up poor but politically wired, part of a family that set him on a path he'd spend decades walking. Between 1843 and 1850 he was out of the country more than in it, writing from exile in Chile and Argentina, sharpening his pen against the strongman he despised. That book, Facundo, was more than literary output - it was a manifesto that pitted what he saw as Europe's enlightened democracy against the brutal caudillo culture of 19th-century Argentina, the gaucho turned warlord. The work made him famous and gave him a war to fight. From 1868 to 1874 he ran the country, pouring energy into schools for children and women, building train lines and a postal system, studying other nations' approaches to education during years of ministerial work. He died of a heart attack in Asunción in 1888 at 77, buried in Buenos Aires, remembered as the writer Miguel de Unamuno would later call one of the greatest in Castilian prose.