This work received the biography prize from the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) , and it also won the Critic's Prize in 1998.

It is a Domingo del Monte's biography, capital figure of Cuban culture, surrounded by two generations of writers and artists during the twenties, thirties and fourties in the 19th century, who promoted periodical publications, meetings, conferences and translations of the latest world literature of his time. Del Monte's effort is important because it allowed unifying and becoming conscious of his Cuban identity in that insular intellectuality. In spite of this, he had never been subject of a biography before.

The author has worked with many Cuban and foreign documentary sources to reconstruct Del Monte's life in all its facets: familiar, intellectual, and even economic, in which he reveals unknown aspects of his bonds with sugar oligarchy through railway business in Havana and Matanzas. Its enormous documentary richness is joined by a careful and well-basted story of his life and historical-social circumstances, together with measured and carefully considered analysis that allow evaluating the options, decisions and acts taken by that personality, as well as his interdependence with historical events.

This biography constitutes an innovative work which was not published before, sustained in a very serious and complete documentary and bibliographical investigation of historical and literary aspects, and which offers what it promises: the analysis of a man and his time.

The book also deals with other historical characters closely linked to Del Monte: Saco, Luz y Caballero, Heredia, Plácido, Milanés, or González del Valley brothers. Many decisive episodes of the Cuban cultural historical development also appear linked to this person: the gestation and dissolution of Cuban Academy of Literature, the philosophical polemic on collecticism, the Ladder Conspiracy or the idle pursuits of annexionist current.

The result is expressed in a book of 445 pages that offers, in 28 chapters, a fresco of the Island's cultural process in the first half of the 19th century and up to 1853.