BIENVENIDO

N. SANTOS
PREPARED BY: JAY ANDREW
B. BOBIER
Bienvenido N. Santos was a Filipino-American
fiction, poetry and nonfiction writer. He was
born and raised in Tondo, Manila. His family
roots are originally from Lubao, Pampanga,
Philippines. He lived in the United States for
many years where he is widely credited as a
pioneering Asian-American writer.

Born: 22 March 1911, Tondo

Died: 7 January 1996, Legazpi, Albay
Novels
The Volcano (1965)
Villa Magdalena (1965)
The Praying Man (1982)
The Man Who (Thought He)
Looked Like Robert Taylor (1983)
What the Hell for You Left Your
Heart in San Francisco? (1987)
The Late,Late Show
Short story collections
You Lovely People (1955)
Brother, My Brother (1960)
The Day the Dancers Came (1967, 1991)
Scent of Apples (1979)
Dwell in the Wilderness (1985)
The Old Favorites
The Bus Driver’s Daughter
Maligno sa Banga
Courage (1990's)
The Summer of my 17th Year
Poetry
The Wounded Stag (1956,1992)
Distances: In Time (1983)
"March of Death"
Music for One
Come Home, Heroes
Nonfiction
Memory's Fictions: A Personal
History (1993)
Postscript to a Saintly Life (1994)
Selected Letters: Book 1 (1995)
Selected Letters: Book 2 (1996)
Awards, honors and prizes
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the University of Iowa
Guggenheim Fellowship
Republic Cultural Heritage Award
Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for short fiction (1956, 1961 and
1965)
Fulbright Program Exchange Professorship
American Book Award from Before Columbus Foundation
Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and Letters, University of the
Philippines
Honorary Doctorate in Humanities and Letters, Bicol University (Legazpi
City, Albay, Philippines)
Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, Wichita State
University (Kansas, U.S.)
Bienvenido N. Santos, a novelist who grew
up in Manila's slums and then moved to the
United States and wrote about the pain of
Filipino exiles there, died Sunday at his
family home in Legaspi near the Mount
Mayon volcano in the northern Philippines.
He was 84.
Mr. Santos, who wrote in English, was a
Rockefeller Foundation fellow and
Fulbright professor at the University of
Iowa and later received a
Guggenheim Foundation fellowship,
the American Book Award and the
Philippine Republic Cultural Heritage
Award.
From 1961 to 1966 he was dean and vice
president of the University of Nueva
Caceres in the Philippines.
In the 1970's, his novel "The Praying Man,"
about political corruption, was banned by
the Government of Ferdinand E. Marcos.
Mr. Santos went into voluntary exile in the
United States.
He was writer in residence from 1973 to
1982 at Wichita State University and
became an American citizen in 1976.
He made his first visit home from exile
after the lifting of martial law in 1981.
He was born on March 22, 1911, and
grew up in the notorious Tondo slum
district of Manila. He went to the United
States in 1941 on a Philippine
Government scholarship and studied
English at the University of Illinois,
Columbia and Harvard.
When the Philippines were invaded by
Japan in World War II, Mr. Santos began
working for the Philippine Government
in exile in Washington and gave
lectures on the spirit of Philippine
resistance. After the war, his novel "The
Volcano" examined an emerging anti-
Americanism in the Philippines.