Wenceslao Fernández Flórez(1884-1964)

Wenceslao Fernández Flórez was born in La Coruña (Galicia, Spain) and showed, since his early childhood, a vocation for medicine, although the death of his father when he was fifteen forced him to leave school and work as a journalist. In 1913 he went to Madrid as an employee in the Directorate General of Customs, but he left that position to work in the newspaper ABC. He won the prize of the Circle of Fine Arts with his novel 'Volvoreta' (1917), which chronicles the forbidden love between a servant and his young master in the framework of rural Galicia. In 1926 he received the National Prize for Literature for his work 'The seven columns'. Despite his unblemished spanishness and conservative ideology, he did not spare his social criticism, sometimes scathing, as in his works 'The Secret of Bluebeard', 'The seven columns' and 'The ironic mirror', among others, all of them about politics and politicians from the reign of Alfonso XIII. During the Second Republic, he received the Gold Medal of Madrid and in 1935 was awarded by the government headed by Alejandro Lerroux with the newly formed Band of the Republic. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he was immediately subjected to threats of death, accused of not he advocated the Popular Front government. In 1944 he participated in the script of the film 'Destiny apologizes' by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia. In 1945 he entered the Royal Spanish Academy. In 1955 it was shooted in La Coruña, from his own script based on his own novel 'Moonlighting' (1915), the film 'The luxury cabin' with a criticism of the Franco's government by the permissiveness of the climbers around emigration to go to work for other countries. In 1951 he adapted for film the novel 'Captain Poison' by Pedro Antonio de Alarcon, which was directed by Luis Marquina. Some of his works were adapted as well into a film by Rafael Gil, such as 'The man who wanted to kill himself', (which Gil directed two versions, one in 1942 and another in 1970) and 'Light footprint' in 1943.