Antonio Buero Vallejo

Antonio Buero Vallejo was born on September 29, 1916 in Guadalajara, Spain. He was the son of a liberal military officer and a pianist mother. He studied art and painting at San Fernando Escuela de Arte, in Madrid. During the Civil War (1936–39), he served as a medical orderly in the Republican Army. After the war, he was condemned to death by the Nationalists, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment. He was held in prison for more than six years. During his imprisonment, he wrote his first play, Palabras en la arena (Words in the Sand), which was not published until 1954. After being released in 1946, he wrote Story of a Stairway in 1949. This work presented a graphic picture of Spain after the Civil War and won the Lope de Vega Prize, establishing Vallejo as one of the foremost authors in Spain. His play In the Burning Darkness (1950) was censored by Franco's regime for its criticism of the lack of freedom and education in Spain. He continued writing plays that combined realism and symbolism to explore the social and political problems of his time. He also wrote biographies of historical figures, such as Juan Van Halen, a Spanish military adventurer, and Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher and writer. He also painted and drew extensively during his life. He married Victoria Rodríguez in 1955 and had no children with her. He was an active supporter of democracy and joined the Communist Party of Spain in 1963. He held various cultural posts during the transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975. He received several awards and honors for his literary work, such as the Lenin Peace Prize in 1954, the Cervantes Prize in 1986 and the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts in 1996. He died due to heart failure on April 29, 2000 in Madrid at the age of 83. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential playwrights and novelists of Spanish literature in the 20th century. He is also remembered as a brilliant writer and orator who left a rich legacy of books, speeches and articles .