Biography
Bienvenido N. Santos was born on March 22, 1911, in Tondo, Manila, Philippines, to Tomas and Vicenta (Nuqui) Santos. At that time, the Philippines was a U.S. colony, and the language of instruction at Santos's school was English.
After graduating from the University of the Philippines in 1932, Santos became an elementary and high school teacher. During this period, he began publishing short stories in English. In September 1941, he traveled to America as a scholar of the Philippine Commonwealth government, already an established writer in his home country. He enrolled in the master’s program in English at the University of Illinois, graduating in 1942. With the U.S. entering World War II, Santos couldn't return to the Philippines, where his wife Beatriz, whom he married in 1933, and their three daughters lived (they later had a son).
In the summer of 1942, Santos studied at Columbia University. From 1942 to 1945, he worked as a public relations officer at the Embassy of the Philippines in Washington, D.C. His first fiction published in America was the short story "Early Harvest" in the magazine Story in 1945. After further studies at Harvard from 1945 to 1946, Santos returned to the Philippines, becoming a professor and vice-president at Legazpi College (now Aquinas University) in Legazpi City. During this time, he published the short story collection You Lovely People (1955) and the poetry collection The Wounded Stag: Fifty-Four Poems (1956).
Santos returned to America in 1958 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he stayed for three years. Throughout the 1960s, he split his time between the U.S. and the Philippines. In 1965, he published his first two novels, Villa Magdalena and The Volcano, supported by a Rockefeller grant and a Guggenheim fellowship. That same year, Santos received the Philippine Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature.
In 1972, the Philippine government banned Santos’s serialized novel The Praying Man, which dealt with government corruption. It was eventually published in book form in 1982. Although Santos planned to return permanently to the Philippines, he found himself in exile once more. From 1973 to 1982, he served as Distinguished Writer-In-Residence at Wichita State University. Santos became a U.S. citizen in 1976. In 1979, his book Scent of Apples, which includes the short story "Immigration Blues," was published as the only collection of his short stories in the United States.
Throughout the 1980s, Santos continued to publish, including the novels The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor (1983) and What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco (1987). He also released a poetry collection, Distances in Time (1983), and a short story collection, Dwell in the Wilderness (1985). Santos passed away on January 7, 1996, at his home in Albay, Philippines.
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