José Eustasio Rivera (February 19, 1888 - December 1, 1928) was a Colombian politician and writer who worked as a lawyer in the arrangement of the limits between Colombia and Venezuela, when he could visit the flatlands and the tropical jungle, places that greatly influenced his works.

Rivera's short labour as a writer began with Tierra de promisión (1921), which is a compilation of poems writen in a modernist style, and ended with his most known work La Vorágine.

La Vorágine

This novel relates the adventures of Arturo Cova and his lover Alicia, whom escaped from Bogotá to be together, running away trough the flatlands and the tropical jungle of Colombia.

This way, Rivera describes the magic of those regions, full of biodiversity, and the lifestyle of the inhabitants. However, one of the main intentions of the novel is to show the inhuman conditions of the workers in the rubber factories. La Vorágine also shows the reader the tremendous adversity of the environment, as the protagonists (Arturo Cova and Alicia) get lost in the jungle and nobody could find them. As the book says: Se los tragó la selva (literally, "they were eaten by jungle").

The novel is written in an elegant and refined prose, full of metaphors and poetry, that shows the beauty and exotism of the virgin jungle.

Finally, La Vorágine is the charachteristic novel of the Latin american modernism, the "jungle novel ", and undoubtably one of the best that has been written in Colombia.