Dr. Ayala won many prestigious prizes in Spain, from the Cervantes award - considered the Spanish-language equivalent of the Nobel for literature - in 1991 to the Prince of Asturias in 1998.
His life as a young man turned into a flight from the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, which ended after Franco died in 1975.
At the outbreak of the conflict in 1936, Dr. Ayala was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on a lecture tour. He returned to work for the Spanish Republican government, but, three years later, as Franco's troops entered Barcelona and the war was all but over, Dr. Ayala took the route of many Spanish intellectuals - exile in America.
Dr. Ayala published his first book, Tragicomedy of a Man Without Spirit, in 1925 and received a doctorate in law from Madrid University in 1930.
In Buenos Aires, he taught sociology and founded the literary and cultural magazine Reality, publishing works by Argentine and Spanish writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Juan Ramon Jimenez.
He then moved to Puerto Rico in 1950, where he founded the respected cultural magazine La Torre.
In 1955, he began a 20-year stint in the United States, working at Princeton, Rutgers, New York University, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Chicago, and New York's City University.
Dr. Ayala, who settled back in Spain in 1975, the year Franco died, delved into ways of reconciling individual conscience with society and applying ancient moral values to modern times. - AP
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