Born in 1913 of a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father, Pedro Mir is the Dominican Republic's foremost literary figure of the 20th century. Since publishing his first poems in 1937, Mir sought through literature to place the Caribbean experience in global historical perspective. In 1947, the subject of mounting suspicions of the Trujillo dictatorship, Mir was forced to go into exile. When he returned fifteen years later, following the death of the dictator, the poet immediately won the hearts of the Dominican people, and his poetry recitals were mass public events attended by enthusiastic crowds of citizens from every walk of life. In 1982 the legislature of the Dominican Congress conferred upon Mir the title of National Poet, and in January 1993 he received the National Prize for Literature, the highest honor a literary artist can receive in the Dominican Republic.
Mir also produced considerable work in the fields of history, fiction, and art criticism and theory, in which he has written Apertura a la estética (1974), Fundamentos de teoría y crítica de arte (1979), and La estética del soldadito (1991).
Pedro Mir died in Santo Domingo in 2000.
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