Summary
Camilo Jose Cela: The Beehive
Camilo José Cela (1916 - 2002) is the most famous Spanish writer of the second half of the twentieth century. He published poetry, stories, articles, travelogues and novels. He was born in Iria Flavia in Galicia as the oldest of nine children in an upper middle class family. He studied law in Madrid until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, in which he fought on Franco's side and was seriously wounded.
After the war, he worked as a censor. He experienced literary fame thanks to the novel Pascual Duarte and his crimes (La familia de Pascual Duarte, 1942), which started a new direction in post-war Spanish narrative prose, the so-called tremendismo (description of pathological violence in a sick social and family environment). In the novel The Beehive (La Colmena, 1951) he described the life of post-war Madrid in a neorealistic way in 1943. His most famous travel book is Viaje a la Alcarria (Viaje a la Alcarria, 1948).
He is one of the five Spanish Nobel laureates and the only one who received the Nobel Prize (1989) for a novel.
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