AUB, MAX

AUB, MAX (1903–1972), Spanish poet, novelist, and playwright. Aub was born in Paris of a German father and a French mother, but on the outbreak of World War i the family moved to Valencia and he eventually took Spanish citizenship. A staunch anti-Fascist, Aub fled to France after the Spanish Civil War. After the defeat of France in 1940, he was imprisoned in several concentration camps. The last of these was Djelfa, in North Africa. In 1942 he escaped from Djelfa to Mexico, where most of his writing was done. Aub's first play, Narciso, written under the influence of the Vanguardist movement, appeared in 1928 and his first novel, Geografía, in 1929. His best-known works, while difficult to classify, deal primarily with the political and social realities of contemporary life. The novels Campo Cerrado (1944), Campo de Sangre (1946), Campo Abierto (1951), and Campo del Moro (1963) are based on the Spanish Civil War. La Calle de Valverde (1961) recreates the artistic and literary life of pre-war Madrid. Aub's bitter three-act tragedy, San Juan (1943), is about some Jewish refugees on an old cargo ship in the Mediterranean who are refused permission to land anywhere. Diario de Djelfa (1944) is a poetic account of Aub's internment in North Africa. Jusep Torres Campalans (1958) is a light-hearted literary hoax about a Catalan painter invented by Aub.

bibliography:

Primer Acto, no. 52 (May, 1964), 6–41; Manual de Historia de la Literatura Española, 1 (1966), contains bibliography.

[Kenneth R. Scholberg]