Biography
The novelist Ramón J. Sender spent his childhood in the Aragonese towns of Chalamera, Alcolea de Cinca and Tauste, where his father worked. He never managed to tune in to the authoritarian attitude of his father, who sent him to a religious boarding school.
After finishing high school, in 1918 (at the age of seventeen) he moved to Madrid, alone and penniless, so that he had to sleep in the open on a bench in the Retiro for three months, washing in the fountains and showering in the Athenaeum showers. where he went daily to read and write. He began in literature at that age, writing articles and stories that he published under a pseudonym in the press of the time. At that period he enrolled in Philosophy and Letters in Madrid, but he could not sustain that routine and discipline and dropped out of studies to train on his own by reading voraciously in libraries and buying books when he could; He shared that vocation as a writer with his political vocation and the revolutionary activities with groups of anarchist workers.
But his father went to Madrid and took his son out of that life, legally forcing him to return home, since he was a minor. When he was twenty-one years old (1922) he had to join the army, where he went from soldier to corporal, from corporal to sergeant, from sergeant to non-commissioned officer and from non-commissioned officer to complementary second lieutenant in the Moroccan war between 1922 and 1924. Upon returning from Morocco free from military service, he joined the editorial staff of the prestigious newspaper El Sol as editor and proofreader from 1924 to 1930.
When the Spanish civil war broke out, he joined a republican column as a soldier. In October, his wife was shot in Zamora. When his children were left homeless in the Francoist zone, already in 1937, he went to France and recovered them in Bayonne through the International Red Cross. After passing through a concentration camp, he arrived in New York in 1939 and later in Mexico. In 1946 he became a naturalized American and in September 1947 he took possession of the chair of Spanish Literature at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which he served for sixteen years in a row. During his stay in the United States, between 1950 and 1954 he suffered the witch hunt with which the far-right senator Joseph McCarthy. He returned to Spain when he was awarded the Planeta Prize for "En la vida de Ignacio Morell" (1969). In May 1974, once the ban on his works was lifted, he returned to visit and from 1976, declaring his intention to return again to establish his residence in his native country. In 1980 he requested from San Diego (California) to regain Spanish nationality and renounce his American nationality. He died two years later in the United States, on January 16, 1982.
