He did his first studies at the Colegio San Luis Gonzaga in Santo Domingo, a city where his parents took him to reside during his childhood.
During the time period between 1928 and 1938, he represented the country at political conventions, signing international treaties on human rights conferences held in the United States, South America and the Caribbean.
Remembered as one of Dominican Republic’s great modernists, his first venture into literature was as an essayist, with work Notas y escorzos (1898), which chronicles the life and work of the most notable members of the modernist literary movement.
However, it is in creative prose where he manages to express his true qualities as a writer, especially in his book Ciudad romántica (1911) and the novel La Sangre (1913).
Much of his work is characterized by the severity with which he depicted political and social problems in the Dominican Republic, where he openly denounced many of the crimes committed during the dictatorship of Ulises Heureaux.