José Santos González Vera (2 November 1897 – 27 February 1970) was a

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

anarchist Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not neces ...

writer. He won the

Chilean National Prize for Literature {{Use dmy dates, date=October 2020 In Chile, the National Prize for Literature ''(Premio Nacional de Literatura)'' was created by Law No. 7,368 during the presidency of Juan Antonio Ríos on 8 November 1942. It consists of a lump-sum monetary prize ...

in 1950.

Biography

González Vera was born on 2 November 1897 in San Francisco del Monte, a small town southern Santiago, the capital city of Chile. In 1903 his family moved to Talagante, also a small town in the area. When González Vera was 11, he travelled to Santiago to attend Liceo Valentín Letelier (Valentin Letelier High School). After one year, he could not pass his classes and quit school. At the age of 13, he starts to work: he was a painter apprentice, tailor shop assistant, bargain sale's assistant, smelting worker, hairdresser, shoeshine boy, secretary in a butcher's society, commission agent, cashier and trolley's money collector in Valparaiso. Those experiences led him to become an anarchist: "I was a young man when I had to work in different things to survive. This is how I met different workers who wanted to establish an igualitarian and free society, the way anarchist thinks it should be. Soon after that, I started to dream about it too, because nothing helps you the most to make up your mind about those things than youth" González Vera became interested in literature when he was 20. He read the work of

Maxim Gorki Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (russian: link=no, Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в; – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (russian: Макси́м Го́рький, link=no), was a Russian writer and sociali ...

and

Peter Kropotkin Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (; russian: link=no, Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин ; 9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, historian, scientist, philosopher, and activis ...

, one of the most important theorist of anarchism. Right after that, he started writing to expand the ideology of "giving a righter order to society". José Santos was the founder member and the writer of ''La Pluma'' (The Feather), along with Manuel Rojas; and ''Numen''. He collaborated with ''Claridad'' (Clarity), a journal of the Student Federation of the

Universidad de Chile The University of Chile ( es, Universidad de Chile) is a public research university in Santiago, Chile. It was founded on November 19, 1842, and inaugurated on September 17, 1843.

. He also wrote for the journal Atenea, in the city of Concepcion. During the persecution of the Student Federation of the Universidad de Chile in 1920, after the Don Ladislao's war, he travels to the southern part of the country, where he meets a young

Pablo Neruda Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda (; ), was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Nerud ...

and the well known poet

Gabriela Mistral Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (; 7 April 1889 – 10 January 1957), known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral (), was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist. In 1945 she became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Lite ...

. He got married with the teacher and communist party member María Marchant in 1932. They had two kids, Álvaro and María Elena. 1897 births 1970 deaths Chilean male writers National Prize for Literature (Chile) winners {{Chile-writer-stub Chilean anarchists