Francisco Ayala (novelist)

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Francisco Ayala García-Duarte

Born	March 16, 1906 (1906-03-16) (age 102) Granada, Andalusia, Spain
Pen name	Francisco Ayala
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	Spanish
Writing period	1925 - present

Official website http://www.ffayala.es/

Francisco Ayala García-Duarte (born March 16, 1906) is a Spanish writer and teacher. Born in Granada, at the age of nineteen he published his first novel, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Ayala was out of the country. He returned for a brief time, later serving as secretary of the Spanish Republic's legation in Prague. After the war he moved to Argentina where he lived between 1939 and 1950. There he taught sociology while continuing to publish works of fiction, literary criticism and sociology, notably a three-volume Tratado de la sociología (1947.) He also lived briefly in Brazil and after 1950 in Puerto Rico, where he taught at the University of Puerto Rico. He later moved to the United States, teaching in various universities, including Bryn Mawr, Princeton, New York University and Brooklyn College. In 1956 he returned to Spain for the first time. He has continued to write essays and fiction on various themes. Many of his writings deal with the topics of power and abuse of power. In general he has not directly written about the war in Spain, but examines it instead through other periods of history. Some of his works are:

La cabeza de cordero (1949) Muerte de perros (1958) El fondo del vaso (1962) El regreso (1992) y El escritor en su siglo (1990)

In 2005, his memoirs were published, titled Recuerdos y olvidos, just like Jacinto Benavente's memoirs, a fact that Ayala does not acknowledge in his book, where he nevertheless permits himself several vicious anecdotes about Benavente.