Camillo Jose Cela Biography
Camilo José de Cela y Trulock (Padrón, 11 May 1916 – Madrid, 17 January 2002) was a Spanish writer, member of the Royal Spanish Academy from 1957 until his death. Cela was born in Padrón, Galicia, on 11 May 1916 to a Galician father, Camilo Crisanto Cela y Fernández, and a Spanish mother of English and Italian origins, Camila Emanuela Trulock y Bertorini. He began his studies in Medicine at the Complutense University and at the same time participated in some lessons in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Madrid. He fought in the Spanish Civil War on the nationalist side, was wounded at the front and hospitalized. Once the war was over he dedicated himself to journalism and did various bureaucratic jobs. He married María del Rosario Conde Picavea in 1944 with whom, two years later, he had his son Camilo José. In the midst of a panorama characterized by the abundance of novels of little innovative capacity, in 1942 a book by Cela of singular literary importance was published: The Family of Pascual Duarte (La familia de Pascual Duarte). In 1943 Pabellón de reposo was released, a set of tuberculosis monologues in a sanatorium, in which he explored the existentialist line, which in Pascual Duarte's The Family had manifested itself in the characterization of life as something absurd. In 1948 he published Viaje a la Alcarria in which he described, although without excessive crudeness, a backward and marginal rural world, similar to that of The Family of Pascual Duarte. The Beehive (the Colmena), Cela's most important work, inaugurates the social realism of the 1950s. It will be published in 1951 in Buenos Aires, given that censorship had prohibited its publication in Spain due to some erotic passages. Always restless and eager to find new narrative paths, his next novel, Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo (1953), moves away from realism to immerse himself in the mind of a madwoman who converses with her dead son. After a long parenthesis, in 1969 he published San Camilo 1936, an experimental novel which, through a single interior monologue, offers a surrealist and "esperpentic" description of the first day of the civil war in a brothel in Madrid.
