The Cuban independence hero and poet José Martí lived in New York from 1880 to 1895. He was a New Yorker, and easily the most important literary figure then residing in the city (after Walt Whitman's departure to rural New Jersey). During most of those years he made his living as a journalist, writing about the United States for the readers of Latin America's most important newspapers. His U.S. crónicas take up more than 2,000 pages of his collected works -- an unrivaled treasure of information, detail, insight, analysis, and thought about America's Gilded Age, all written in a vibrant, poetic prose that revolutionized the Spanish language.