Rudolfo Anaya
- LAST REVIEWED: 18 October 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 April 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0043
- LAST REVIEWED: 18 October 2023
- LAST MODIFIED: 28 April 2016
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0043
Introduction
Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya (b. 30 October 1937) was born in Pastura and grew up in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. In 1952, his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in 1956 he graduated from Albuquerque High School. Three experiences from his childhood years profoundly influenced his writing—inspiration from his literate mother and vaquero (cowboy) father, the beauty and diversity of New Mexico culture and landscape, and, in 1954, a swimming accident that broke his back and was referenced in his novel Tortuga (Anaya 1979, cited under Novels). He earned three degrees from the University of New Mexico—in 1963, a BA in English; in 1968, a master’s in English; and in 1972, a master’s in counseling. In 1966, he married Patricia Lawless, from 1963 to 1970 he taught in the Albuquerque public schools, and in 1971 became the University of Albuquerque’s director of counseling. From 1974 to 1993, he taught English, creative writing, and Chicano literature at the University of New Mexico, and over those teaching years he wrote fiction, poetry, essays, and drama. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the American Book Award (1980), the prestigious National Medal of the Arts (2001), the Notable New Mexican Award (2007), and the Robert Kirsch Award (2011). The New Mexico setting has helped define his work and figures even in such volumes as A Chicano in China (1986). His masterpiece, Bless Me, Ultima (see Anaya 1994, cited under Novels; originally published in 1972), established many themes that would inform later work—indigenous influences on US culture, spirituality, the significance of land to community, the Chicano movement, and reconciling modern culture with traditional values. A book focused on Mexican American traditions, the clash of traditional and modern culture, and crises of conscience, Bless Me, Ultima was the first “Chicano” (Mexican American) novel to reach a national audience. Subsequent novels and short-story collections were also well received, especially Heart of Aztlán (1976), Tortuga (1979), The Silence of the Llano (1982), and Alburquerque (see Anaya 2006, cited under Novels; originally published in 1992). His detective series with private investigator Sonny Baca includes Zia Summer (see Anaya 2008a, cited under Novels; originally published in 1995), Rio Grande Fall (see Anaya 2008b, cited under Novels; originally published in 1996), Shaman Winter (see Anaya 2009, cited under Novels; originally published in 1999), and Jemez Spring (Anaya 2005, cited under Novels). His later works, more introspective and philosophical, include The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories (Anaya 2006, cited under Collected Works), Randy Lopez Goes Home (Anaya 2011, cited under Novels), Billy the Kid and Other Plays (Anaya 2011, cited under Collected Works), The Old Man’s Love Story (Anaya 2013, cited under Novels), and The Sorrows of Young Alfonso (Anaya 2016, cited under Novels).
Primary Works
Anaya is an unusual writer in that he has worked across five genres: the novel, the short story, drama, poetry, and essays.
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
How to Subscribe
Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.
Article
- Adams, Alice
- Adams, Henry
- African American Vernacular Tradition
- Agee, James
- Alcott, Louisa May
- Alexie, Sherman
- Alger, Horatio
- American Exceptionalism
- American Grammars and Usage Guides
- American Literature and Religion
- American Magazines, Early 20th-Century Popular
- "American Renaissance"
- American Revolution, Music of the
- Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
- Anaya, Rudolfo
- Anderson, Sherwood
- Angel Island Poetry
- Antin, Mary
- Anzaldúa, Gloria
- Apess, William
- Austin, Mary
- Baldwin, James
- Barlow, Joel
- Barth, John
- Beats
- Bellamy, Edward
- Bellow, Saul
- Bible and American Literature, The
- Bierce, Ambrose
- Bishop, Elizabeth
- Bourne, Randolph
- Boyle, Kay
- Bradford, William
- Bradstreet, Anne
- Brockden Brown, Charles
- Brooks, Van Wyck
- Brown, Sterling
- Brown, William Wells
- Butler, Octavia
- Byrd, William
- Cahan, Abraham
- Callahan, Sophia Alice
- Captivity Narratives
- Cather, Willa
- Cervantes, Lorna Dee
- Chesnut, Mary Boykin
- Chesnutt, Charles Waddell
- Child, Lydia Maria
- Childhood Studies
- Chopin, Kate
- Cisneros, Sandra
- Civil War Literature, 1861–1914
- Clark, Walter Van Tilburg
- Connell, Evan S.
- Cooper, Anna Julia
- Cooper, James Fenimore
- Copyright Laws
- Corridos
- Crane, Stephen
- Creeley, Robert
- Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la
- Cullen, Countee
- Culture, Mass and Popular
- Davis, Rebecca Harding
- Dawes Severalty Act
- de Burgos, Julia
- de Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John
- Delany, Samuel R.
- Dick, Philip K.
- Dickinson, Emily
- Disability
- Doctorow, E. L.
- Douglass, Frederick
- Dreiser, Theodore
- Dubus, Andre
- Dunbar, Paul Laurence
- Dunbar-Nelson, Alice
- Dune and the Dune Series, Frank Herbert’s
- Eastman, Charles
- Eaton, Edith Maude (Sui Sin Far)
- Eaton, Winnifred
- Edwards, Jonathan
- Eliot, T. S.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo
- Environmental Writing
- Equiano, Olaudah
- Erdrich (Ojibwe), Louise
- Faulkner, William
- Fauset, Jessie
- Federalist Papers, The
- Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
- Fiedler, Leslie
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott
- Frank, Waldo
- Franklin, Benjamin
- Freeman, Mary Wilkins
- Frontier Humor
- Fuller, Margaret
- Gaines, Ernest
- Garland, Hamlin
- Garrison, William Lloyd
- Gibson, William
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
- Ginsberg, Allen
- Glasgow, Ellen
- Glaspell, Susan
- Gold, Mike
- González, Jovita
- Graphic Narratives in the U.S.
- Great Awakening(s)
- Griggs, Sutton
- Hansberry, Lorraine
- Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins
- Harte, Bret
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel
- Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody
- H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
- Hellman, Lillian
- Hemingway, Ernest
- Higginson, Ella Rhoads
- Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
- Hughes, Langston
- Imagism
- Indian Removal
- Irving, Washington
- James, Henry
- Jefferson, Thomas
- Jen, Gish
- Jesuit Relations
- Jewett, Sarah Orne
- Johnson, Charles
- Johnson, James Weldon
- Kerouac, Jack
- King, Martin Luther
- Kirkland, Caroline
- Knight, Sarah Kemble
- Larsen, Nella
- Lazarus, Emma
- Le Guin, Ursula K.
- Levertov, Denise
- Lewis, Sinclair
- Literary Biography, American
- Literature, Italian-American
- London, Jack
- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
- Lorde, Audre
- Lost Generation
- Lowell, Amy
- Magazines, Nineteenth-Century American
- Mailer, Norman
- Malamud, Bernard
- Manifest Destiny
- Mather, Cotton
- Maxwell, William
- McCarthy, Cormac
- McCarthy, Mary
- McCullers, Carson
- McKay, Claude
- McNickle, D'Arcy
- Melville, Herman
- Merrill, James
- Millay, Edna St. Vincent
- Miller, Arthur
- Moore, Marianne
- Morrison, Toni
- Morton, Sarah Wentworth
- Mourning Dove (Syilx Okanagan)
- Mukherjee, Bharati
- Murray, Judith Sargent
- Native American Oral Literatures
- New England “Pilgrim” and “Puritan” Cultures
- New Netherland Literature
- Newspapers, Nineteenth-Century American
- Norris, Zoe Anderson
- Northup, Solomon
- Oakes Smith, Elizabeth
- O'Brien, Tim
- Occom, Samson and the Brotherton Indians
- Olsen, Tillie
- Olson, Charles
- Ortiz, Simon
- Paine, Thomas
- Peters, Phillis Wheatley
- Petry, Ann
- Piatt, Sarah
- Pinsky, Robert
- Plath, Sylvia
- Poe, Edgar Allan
- Porter, Katherine Anne
- Proletarian Literature
- Realism and Naturalism
- Reed, Ishmael
- Regionalism
- Rich, Adrienne
- Rivera, Tomás
- Robinson, Kim Stanley
- Roth, Henry
- Roth, Philip
- Rowson, Susanna Haswell
- Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo
- Rukeyser, Muriel
- Russ, Joanna
- Sanchez, Sonia
- Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston
- Selzer, Richard
- Sentimentalism and Domestic Fiction
- Sermons
- Sexton, Anne
- Silko, Leslie Marmon
- Sinclair, Upton
- Smith, John
- Smith, Lillian
- Spofford, Harriet Prescott
- Stein, Gertrude
- Steinbeck, John
- Stevens, Wallace
- Stoddard, Elizabeth
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher
- Tate, Allen
- Terry Prince, Lucy
- Thoreau, Henry David
- Time Travel
- Tourgée, Albion W.
- Transcendentalism
- Truth, Sojourner
- Twain, Mark
- Tyler, Royall
- Updike, John
- Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe
- Viramontes, Helena María
- Vizenor, Gerald
- Walker, David
- Walker, Margaret
- War Literature, Vietnam
- Warren, Mercy Otis
- Warren, Robert Penn
- Wells, Ida B.
- Welty, Eudora
- Wendy Rose (Miwok/Hopi)
- Westerns
- Wharton, Edith
- Whitman, Sarah Helen
- Whitman, Walt
- Whitman’s Bohemian New York City
- Whittier, John Greenleaf
- Wideman, John Edgar
- Wigglesworth, Michael
- Williams, Roger
- Williams, Tennessee
- Williams, William Carlos
- Wilson, August
- Winthrop, John
- Wister, Owen
- Wolf, Emma
- Woolman, John
- Woolson, Constance Fenimore
- Wright, Richard