Background
Ramón J. Sender was born in Chalamera, Huesca, in Spain.
Ramón J. Sender was born in Chalamera, Huesca, in Spain.
In 1923 he was conscripted into the Spanish military and took part in the Rif War (1919-1926). Later that year he returned to Madrid, where he worked as a journalist for El Sol, a newspaper critical of the current government. In 1926 he was imprisoned for writing Casas viejas.
When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, he immediately enlisted to help resist Franco.
Sender had been an anarchist and then a communist but following the Spanish Civil War he reneged this ideology and sought asylum in France in 1938. He left Spain for New York after the Spanish Civil War in 1939, and then relocated to Mexico like many scientists, artists and intellectuals during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas.
He became an American citizen in 1948, and he lived in the United States until 1972, when he returned to live in Spain for several years before dying in San Diego, California, in 1982. Sender"s son is the composer and writer Ramon Sender.