Portrait of an Unknown Man: Manuel Azana and Modern Spain

Paul Stewart’s translation of Portrait of an Unknown Man, Cipriano de Rivas Cherif’s biography of his brother-in-law and friend, introduces to English-speaking readers Manuel Azana, Spain’s wartime president whom the Franco regime had treated as a nonperson.
Considered the symbol of the Second Republic in Spain, Azana was the subject of a flood of books and articles in 1990, the fiftieth anniversary of his death. The Spanish Ministry of Culture sponsored a major exhibition honoring Azana as author and statesman, while symposia dedicated to him were held in Barcelona and Montauban, France, where he died after finding uneasy refuge from Franco’s armies and Hitler’s Gestapo.
The biography also clarifies the complex politics of Spain in the twenties and thirties by focusing on this preeminent politician of that era, and it achieves depth in its portrait by painting the background of three generations of a bourgeois family caught up in dramatically changing times.