Francisco Ayala García-Duarte (1906-2009) was a Spanish writer, who also served as a narrator and essayist. In addition, he excelled as a translator. On the other hand, much of the author's literary work was developed in exile as a result of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936.
Ayala's work was divided into before the Civil War and after it. He was characterized by writing, at first, in a traditional way within the intellectual character forged by the writer José Ortega y Gasset, and then his work became avant-garde.
Some of the most relevant works by Francisco Ayala were Tragicomedy of a man without a spirit Y Hunter at dawn. Intelligence, a well-developed and cultured language, as well as his outstanding use and handling of metaphor as a literary resource, were part of his style..
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Francisco was born in Granada on March 16, 1906, into a cultured family. His parents were the lawyer Francisco Ayala Arroyo, and Luz García-Duarte González. In addition, he was the grandson of the renowned doctor Eduardo García Duarte, who served as rector of the University of Granada.
Francisco Ayala's years of education were spent in his native Granada. After he graduated from high school, he went to live in Madrid. At the age of sixteen he began to study law and philosophy and letters at the Central University of Madrid.
During that period, at the beginning of the 1920s, he began to interact with the groups of intellectuals of the time, and with avant-garde literature. Between 1925 and 1926 he published Tragicomedy of a man without a spirit and Story of a sunrise; graduated from college in 1929.
At the time of having graduated from university, Ayala made some collaborations for print media such as The Literary Gazette Y Western Magazine. At the beginning of 1930 he went to Berlin, having won a scholarship to continue his studies..
The stay in the German city connected him with an unknown part of Europe. The writer took advantage of having witnessed the birth of the Nazis to send writings to the magazine Politics. A year later he returned to Spain, obtained a doctorate in law, and served as a professor.
In the years prior to the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Ayala had been a lawyer in the Cortes. Just when the contest began, he was in South America giving talks and lectures. However, despite the crisis, he returned to his country and joined the Republican side..
Between 1936 and 1939 he worked at the Ministry of State, and also as a diplomat for Spain in Prague. During that period his father was assassinated by the rebel group, after being arrested and taken to the Burgos jail, the city where he was working..
Ayala left for Buenos Aires after the war ended in 1939, with his wife Carolyn Richmond and their daughter Nina. In the capital of Argentina, the writer began his literary life again, and also worked for media such as the newspaper The nation and the magazine South.
The Spanish lived in Buenos Aires for ten years, with the exception of 1945 when he settled in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1950 he went to Puerto Rico, a country in whose main university he taught sociology, was in charge of the editorial department and founded the magazine Tower.
Francisco Ayala left Puerto Rico for the United States, and there he lived the last twenty years of his exile. He taught Spanish literature at universities such as New York, Chicago, Rutgers, and Princeton. In 1960 he had the opportunity to return to his country for the first time.
From that first return to Spain, Ayala visited his country every summer, came to buy a property. Little by little he resumed literary contacts and established new relationships. In 1976 he made the decision to return definitively and he resided in Madrid.
Based in Madrid, Ayala began giving talks and conferences, as well as collaborating for various newspapers and magazines. When he was seventy-seven years old he was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, in 1988 he was awarded the National Prize for Spanish Letters.
With advanced age, but with an extraordinary lucidity, he wrote in 1988 The garden of malice, and from 1982 he began to write the memoirs Memories and forgetfulness. Francisco Ayala died of natural causes in Madrid, on November 3, 2009 at the age of one hundred and three..
Francisco Ayala's literary style was characterized by the use of a cultured and sober language. His first works, those developed before the Civil War, were traditional, and later they entered the avant-garde movement, with great eloquence and expressiveness, and the extensive use of metaphors..
In the post-war period, his writings were oriented towards the concerns he had about society and the problems that afflicted it. Maintaining the same expressive capacity and careful language, but often using an ironic and satirical tone.
- "I give the country an accidental value: it is not essence, but circumstance".
- "Incompetence is all the more harmful the greater the power of the incompetent".
- "The homeland of the writer is his language".
- “One always writes his own life, only, out of modesty, he writes it in hieroglyph; and how much better if he did it on funeral stones, lapidary, looking for the stark beauty of the epitaph - to enclose life in a bullet or in an epigram ".
- “Suddenly we have found that it is true that the world is only one. Globalization, just a little word, but it has ended up being true. The world is only one ".
- "Life is an invention, and literature, a perfected memory".
- "Freedom is not a fruit within the reach of all hands".
- "The true intellectual exercise does not consist in following fashions, but in facing the difficulties of one's own time".
- "Human behaviors linked to the natural condition are, deep down, immutable".
- “Literature is the essential. Everything that is not literature does not exist. Because where is the reality?
- Tragicomedy of a man without a spirit (1925).
- Story of a sunrise (1926).
- The boxer and an angel (1929).
- Hunter at dawn (1930).
- The bewitched (1944).
- The usurpers (1949).
- The head of the lamb (1949).
- Macaque history (1955).
- Dog kills (1958).
- The bottom of the glass (1962).
- The Ace of Wands (1963).
- My best pages (1965).
- The rapture (1965).
- Stories (1966).
- Complete narrative works. Glorious Triumph of Prince Arjuna (1969).
- You cried at the Generalife.
- The Garden of Earthly Delights (1971).
- The bewitched and other tales (1972).
- Of triumphs and sorrows (1982).
- Memories and forgetfulness I (1982).
- Memories and forgetfulness II (1983).
- The garden of malice (1988).
- Memories and forgetfulness (1988).
- Grenadian stories (1990).
- The return (1992).
- Of my steps on earth (nineteen ninety six).
- Sweet memories (1998).
- A gentleman from Granada and other stories (1999).
- Imaginary tales (1999).
- The world and me (1985).
- Francisco Ayala in The Nation of Buenos Aires (2012).
- Inquiry of the cinema (1929).
- Social law in the Constitution of the Spanish Republic (1932).
- The living thought of Saavedra Fajardo (1941).
- The problem of liberalism (1941).
- History of freedom (1943).
- The politicians (1944).
- Histrionism and representation (1944).
- A double political experience: Spain and Italy (1944).
- Essay on Freedom (1945).
- Jovellanos (1945).
- Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism. Edition and preliminary study of Juan Donoso Cortés (1949).
- The invention of Don Quixote (1950).
- Sociology treatise (1947).
- Political sociology essays (1951).
- Introduction to social sciences (1952).
- Rights of the individual person for a mass society (1953).
- Brief theory of translation (1956).
- The writer in mass society (1956).
- The current crisis in education (1958).
- Social integration in America (1958).
- Technology and freedom (1959).
- Experience and invention (1960).
- Reason of the world (1962).
- Of this world and the other (1963).
- Reality and dream (1963).
- The evasion of the intellectuals (1963).
- Translation problems (1965).
- Spain to date (1965).
- The cheeky curious (1967).
- Cinema, art and entertainment (1969).
- Reflections on the narrative structure (1970).
- El Lazarillo: reexamined, reexamination of some aspects (1971).
- The essays. Literary Theory and Criticism (1972).
- Confrontations (1972).
- Today is already yesterday (1972).
- The reading of casticism. Prologue (1973).
- Cervantes and Quevedo (1974).
- The novel: Galdós and Unamuno (1974).
- The writer and his image (1975).
- The writer and the cinema (1975).
- Galdós in his time (1978).
- Time and me. The Garden of Earthly Delights (1978).
- Words and letters (1983).
- The narrative structure and other literary experiences (1984).
- The rhetoric of journalism and other rhetorics (1985).
- The image of Spain (1986).
- My room behind my back (1988).
- The feathers of the Phoenix. Spanish Literature Studies (1989).
- The writer in his century (1990).
- Against power and other trials (1992).
- Time and me or the world behind my back (1992).
- What world do we live in (nineteen ninety six).
- Glances at the Present: Essays and Sociology, 1940-1990 (2006).
- Lorenzo and Ana, by Arnold Zweig (1930).
- Constitution theory, by Carl Schmitt (1934).
- What is the third estate ?, de Emmanuel Joseph Sièyes (1942).
- Memoirs of a militia sergeant, by Manuel Antônio de Almeida (1946).
- The Roman, by Alberto Moravia (1950).
- The swapped heads, by Thomas Mann (1970).
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