In recognition of the life and works of Francisco Ayala, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Colorado at Boulder held a symposium on October 6 and 7, 2006 (see program). Ayala scholars from our own department as well as distinguished invited faculty from other universities will read papers, hold round table discussions and dialogue with students and the general audience about this most important author. Attendance is open and free to all interested in contemporary Spanish literary traditions. We welcome you and hope that you will participate in our department's tribute to Francisco Ayala. We hope to see you there.
About Ayala
On March 16, 2006, Francisco Ayala celebrated his 100th birthday. Born in Granada, Spain to an upper-class family of well-educated parents, the young Paco was raised in this ancient city of the Moorish Alhambra until the age of seventeen, when he enrolled in Law School at the University of Madrid. By the time he graduated in 1929, he had already published two novels, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu (1925) and Historia de un amanecer (1926). Such literary successes in one so young did not go unnoticed in Madrid's intellectual circles, one of which, led by the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, invited Ayala to join its ranks. At the time, Ortega's Revista de Occidente publishing house and home to the journal of the same name was probably the most prestigious -- if not elitist --intellectual enterprise in all of Spain. There, in the daily tertulias, Ayala listened and learned from this influential thinker and rubbed elbows with a select group of novelists and artists whose works continue to influence Spanish letters and the arts to this day. In the journal Revista de Occidente Ayala collaborated with short stories, essays on vanguard topics and movie reviews.
All the while he displayed this constant literary activity, Ayala continued his university and post-graduate studies. After getting his PhD in Law, he went to Germany in 1929 on a one-year grant to study political science and sociology at the University of Berlin. There, aside from becoming almost fluent in the language, Ayala studied philosophy and literature, became friends with many German Hispanists, met his future wife, and still found the need and the time to continue with his own writings. The short novel Erika ante el invierno is perhaps the best known piece of fiction of his stay in Berlin and the last publication to come from his pen for almost a decade and a half.
As a law professor, Ayala supplemented his salary doing translations of German novels and other writings as well as giving lectures in Spain and abroad. It was during one of these lecture tours in Latin America that the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. The deaths of his father and one of his brothers in the bloody conflict persuaded Ayala to leave Spain with his wife and young daughter and seek exile abroad. France was the first stop, followed by Cuba and finally Argentina where the family settled for eleven years (with the exception of the academic term 1945-46, when he taught sociology in Rio de Janeiro). Not one to waste time, Ayala gave his lectures there and also began a project which scarcely one year later culminated in a three-volume Tratado de sociología, a text used in university classrooms throughout the Spanish-speaking world well into the second half of the twentieth century.
Ayala's stay in Buenos Aires again became politically untenable by 1949, as Juan and Evita Perón's all-powerful dictatorship became ever more determined to silence those writers whose works were at odds with the regime's authoritarian ways. Nevertheless, the intervening years had been most productive and signaled a return to fiction writing. Among the most significant publications by Ayala in the 1940's are, by all critical accounts, his two masterpiece collections of short stories, Los usurpadores and La cabeza del cordero, both issued in 1949.
The author was invited to join the faculty at the University of Puerto Rico in 1950 by its well known president, Rubén Benítez, an admirer of Ayala's writings, and charged with organizing its College of General Studies. He did that and more, leaving behind as his most visible and lasting legacy the founding of the prestigious journal La Torre, to this day one of the most respected publications of Hispanic letters. Ayala and his family remained on the island until 1958, when his fame as a literary critic, sociologist, literature professor, political scientist, essayist, and author of novels and short stories made him a figure of such stature that U.S. universities simply couldn't resist making him some very tempting offers. Rutgers University was first, then Bryn Mawr, New York University, Chicago and soon thereafter his definitive return to Spain after the death of Franco. There he lives in an elegant, large and comfortable apartment near the Real Academia Española, to which he was elected many years ago. Francisco Ayala, centenarian and surviving member of the Generation of '27, goes forth every day and continues his intellectual journey as one of Spain's best known and most active men of letters.
