A Longing for the Light

Vicente Aleixandre was born in Sevilla, Spain on April 26, 1898. He studied law at the University of Madrid and at the Madrid School of Economics, but beginning in 1925 he completely devoted himself to literature. He was a member of the Generation of 1927. His first book of poems, Ambit, appeared in 1928. In 1933, he received the National Literary Prize for his work La Destrucción o el Amor (Destruction or Love). After the Spanish Civil War, his work was banned by government censors for nearly five years.

His other works include Sombra del Paraíso (Shadow of Paradise), Historia del Corazón (History of the Heart), En un Vasto Dominio (In a Vast Domain), Poemas de la Consumación (Poems of Consummation), and Diálogos del Conocimiento (Dialogues of Insight). He also published the prose work Los Encuentros (The Meetings). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. He died of a kidney disorder on December 14, 1984.

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