FRANCISCO AYALA: BIOGRAPHY, STYLE, PHRASES AND WORKS - LITERATURE - 2025

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.

Francisco Ayala. Source: Ayalaymavm.jpg: Juanagarciacontrerasderivative work: Rondador, via Wikimedia Commons

Some of the most relevant works by Francisco Ayala were Tragicomedy of a man without spirit and Hunter in the dawn. Intelligence, a well-developed and cultured language, as well as his outstanding use and handling of metaphor as a literary device, were part of his style.

Biography

Birth and family

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.

Ayala academic training

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 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 spirit and History of a dawn; He graduated from college in 1929.

Stay in Berlin

At the time of having graduated from university, Ayala made some collaborations for print media such as La Gaceta Literaria and Revista de Occidente. At the beginning of 1930 he went to Berlin, having won a scholarship to continue his studies.

La Gaceta Literaria, magazine where Ayala collaborated. Source: See page for author, via Wikimedia Commons

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 Political magazine. A year later he returned to Spain, obtained a doctorate in law, and served as a professor.

Civil War period

In the years before 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.

The exile of Ayala

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 La Nación newspaper and Sur magazine.

The Spanish lived in Buenos Aires for ten years, with the exception of 1945 when he settled in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1950 she went to Puerto Rico, a country in whose main university she taught sociology, was in charge of the editorial department and founded the magazine La Torre.

Between the United States and Spain

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 she made the decision to return for good and took up residence in Madrid.

Last years and death

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, in 1988 he wrote 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.

Style

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 then they entered the avant-garde movement, with great eloquence and expressiveness, and the extensive use of metaphors.

University of Puerto Rico, where Ayala served as a professor. Source: Angelgb81, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Phrases

- "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 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, 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 essential. Everything that is not literature does not exist. Because where is the reality?

Plays

Narrative

- The Garden of Earthly Delights (1971).

- The bewitched and other stories (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).

- Tales from Granada (1990).

- The return (1992).

- Of my steps on earth (1996).

- Sweet memories (1998).

- A gentleman from Granada and other stories (1999).

- Imaginary tales (1999).

Press articles

- The world and me (1985).

- Francisco Ayala in La Nación de Buenos Aires (2012).

Test

- 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 copper Catholicism, liberalism and socialism. Edition and preliminary study of Juan Donoso Cortés (1949).

- The invention of Don Quixote (1950).

- Treaty of sociology (1947).

- Essays in political sociology (1951).

- Introduction to the 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 impertinent 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 yesterday (1972).

- The reading of traditionalism. 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).

- Me and time. 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 back room (1988).

- The feathers of the Phoenix. Studies of Spanish Literature (1989).

- The writer in his century (1990).

- Against power and other essays (1992).

- Time and I or The world at the back (1992).

- In what world do we live (1996).

- Looks on the present: essays and sociology, 1940-1990 (2006).

Some translations

- Lorenzo and Ana, by Arnold Zweig (1930).

- Theory of the constitution, by Carl Schmitt (1934).

- What is the third estate ?, by Emmanuel Joseph Sièyes (1942).

- Memoirs of a militia sergeant, by Manuel Antônio de Almeida (1946).

- La romana, by Alberto Moravia (1950).

- The swapped heads, by Thomas Mann (1970).

References

1. Francisco Ayala. (2019). Spain: Wikipedia. Recovered from: es.wikipedia.org.
2. Tamaro, E. (2004-2019). Francisco Ayala. (N / a): Biographies and Lives. Recovered from: biografiasyvidas.com.
3. Francisco Ayala. (S. f.). Spain: Francisco Ayala Foundation. Recovered from: ffayala.es.
4. Ramírez, M., Moreno, V., De la Oliva, C. and Moreno, E. (2018). Francisco Ayala. (N / a): Search Biographies. Recovered from: Buscabiografias.com.
5. Senabre, R. (2006). Francisco Ayala, literature as mission. Spain: El Cultural. Recovered from: elcultural.com.