This compelling biography offers a unique perspective on the life and career of one of Latin America's most famous and most adulated historical figures. Departing from the conventional, narrow treatment of Bol var's role in the Spanish-American wars of independence (1810 1825), leading historian Lester D. Langley frames this remarkable figure as the quintessential Venezuelan rebel, who by circumstance and sheer will rose to be the continent's most noted revolutionary and liberator. In the process, he became both a unifying and a divisive presence whose symbolic influence remains powerful even today. As the author convincingly explains, he remains the most relevant figure of the revolutionary age in the Americas.