What American authors write about Spain?

April 6, 2008 7:42 AM

What literature is written about Spain or the experience of living in Spain by American authors?

This is for a class to be taught in Valencia called, "Spain through American Eyes."

posted by mizrachi to Writing & Language (17 answers total)

For Whom The Bell Tolls?
posted by forallmankind at 7:50 AM on April 6, 2008

Death In The Afternoon
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:00 AM on April 6, 2008

The Sun Also Rises
posted by Oktober at 8:04 AM on April 6, 2008

Iberia by James Michener
posted by thomas144 at 8:09 AM on April 6, 2008

The Harvard professor George Ticknor pretty much originated the anglophone study of Spanish literature in the early 19th century.
posted by footnote at 8:54 AM on April 6, 2008

Death of a Nationalist and its sequels.

On a goofier note, there's Poison by Kathryn Harrison
posted by craichead at 8:55 AM on April 6, 2008

The Alhambra, Washington Irving
posted by Stewriffic at 9:09 AM on April 6, 2008

Not quite literature, though you could read the screenplay, is Barcelona.
posted by brookeb at 9:15 AM on April 6, 2008

The New Yorker has a free fiction podcast [link launched iTunes] where authors who've been published by The New Yorker read stories not by them that have been published in The New Yorker. In one of them, entitled Waiting, Antonya Nelson reads Mavis Gallant's When We Were Nearly Young, which is about an American woman living in Madrid. Here's The New Yorker page about that particular podcast episode and here's a direct link to the mp3 of Antonya Nelson reading Mavis Gallant's When We Were Nearly Young. And then there's Hemingway's many stories about Spain. It's not really about Spain, but everybody, at some point, should read his Hills like White Elephants. But then, at some point, pretty much everyone does.
posted by Kattullus at 9:53 AM on April 6, 2008

you can't go wrong with ernest hemingway.
posted by thinkingwoman at 9:54 AM on April 6, 2008

Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is for my money the second-best foreigner-in-Spain book, after The Sun Also Rises. He was a Brit, however, if that rules out consideration for your purposes.
posted by donpedro at 12:00 PM on April 6, 2008

Seconding Homage to Catalonia, if you don't mind it being written by a Brit.
posted by scody at 1:15 PM on April 6, 2008

Portions of How Soccer Explains the World
posted by Stylus Happenstance at 5:04 PM on April 6, 2008

I read Barcelona by art critic Robert Hughes earlier this year. He was born in Australia but has lived in the US for most of his life. In his intro he describes it as the book he wished he could have read before he visited. The reviews on Amazon reflect this sentiment. It’s a cultural history of the city from the Roman invasion to 1993. From Gaudi to the pooping peasant - caganer it looks at architecture, food, sport, music, art, religion & literature but I like it cos of the bits of trivia and his personal experiences. Hughes is an interesting guy. He used to run with Germaine Greer at Sydney uni with the rest of the Push. He’s an uber-smart, macho dude (his middle name is Studley) with a dry sense of humour but his writing is kinda poetic which makes the 500+ tract pretty engaging. Maybe a bit up-himself but you’ve gotta love the big guy. If you’re short on time you could probably skip the middle chapters. He wrote a pared down version in 2003 called Barcelona: the great enchantress.
posted by nicole.hilder at 6:39 PM on April 6, 2008

John Dos Passos's Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), currently available in The Library of America's Travel Books and Other Writings 1916-1941 volume (which also contains some of his Spanish Civil War dispatches).
posted by azure_swing at 7:03 PM on April 6, 2008

The screenwriter of Costa Brava novelized her script, but it's no longer in print.
posted by brujita at 9:40 PM on April 6, 2008

Pagan Spain by Richard Wright is a fascinating piece of work.
posted by jammy at 7:03 AM on April 7, 2008