Marcial Lafuente Estefanía
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Marcial Lafuente Estefanía (; (13 June 1903 Toledo-7 August 1984 Madrid) was a prolific
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...
writer of romance and
western fiction Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 20th century and ...
, widely considered as the leading voice of the latter genre in the
Hispanic The term Hispanic () are people, Spanish culture, cultures, or countries related to Spain, the Spanish language, or broadly. In some contexts, Hispanic and Latino Americans, especially within the United States, "Hispanic" is used as an Ethnici ...
world. The most conservative sources estimate he wrote 2,600 books. Eventually, his sons, Francisco and Federico and his grandson Francisco, would join the family business by churning out novels under his name.


Early life

Lafuente Estefanía was born in Toledo in 1903. His father, Federico Lafuente López-Elías, was a lawyer and also an author. He studied industrial engineering and worked in Spain,
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,
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, and the
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, where he traveled between 1928 and 1931. During the
Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...
he would become an artillery general in the Republican army. Upon their defeat, he refused to go into exile, and during the subsequent repression he was incarcerated several times and nearly executed. According to Lafuente's son, Federico Lafuente Beorlegui (see
Spanish naming customs Spanish names are the traditional way of identifying, and the official way of registering a person in Spain. They are composed of a given name (simple or composite) and two surnames (the first surname of each parent). Traditionally, the first ...
), during the war Lafuente Estefanía met humor novelist and playwright Enrique Jardiel Poncela, who advised him to write stories that would amuse people, as he believed it to be "the only way to live off writing". Once released from prison in the early 40s, Lafuente began writing mass-market paperbacks, initially for a small publisher in
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. His political allegiances and his imprisonment had made him an outcast under the
fascist regime Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hie ...
, closing him all doors to any jobs in his own trade: thus mass-market literature became his lifesaver. His first books were romances, which he published under his wife's name, María Luisa Beorlegui. In 1943 he published his first western, ''La mascota de la pradera''. He would continue to cultivate this genre until his death.


Work

In 1947 and 1948, Lafuente Estefanía and several other western authors, many of them liberal professionals like him now forced to resort to pulp literature for survival, were attracted toward Spanish publisher Bruguera. Among them were Silver Kane (pen name of lawyer Francisco González Ledesma) or Keith Luger (Miguel Oliveros Touan). At the time, Bruguera was building an empire of popular literature spanning the whole Hispanic world, cemented on mass-market paperbacks and comic-books; Francisco Ibáñez, of ''
Mortadelo y Filemón ''Mort & Phil'' () is a Spanish comics, Spanish comic series, published in more than two dozen languages. It appeared for the first time in 1958 in the children's comic-book magazine drawn by Francisco Ibáñez Talavera, Francisco Ibáñez. Th ...
'' fame, and M.L. Estefanía became Bruguera's star names. According to Silver Kane, Bruguera's guidelines were very strict; novels had to be catchy from page one, and there was heavy censorship. It was frequent to turn in a completed manuscript (around a hundred pages) every week. Given these limitations, Silver Kane said he was often surprised by how good the novels were. Lafuente Estefanía's novels became the readers' favorites. They had a deep impact in the pop culture of Spain, Latin America and the Southern United States in the 50s and 60s. First printings of 30,000 copies were frequent. In the golden years of the format (late 50s and early 60s) printings reached 100,000 copies. Lafuente's creative process often involved adapting popular dramas into typical Far West settings and
stock character A stock character, also known as a character archetype, is a type of character in a narrative (e.g. a novel, play, television show, or film) whom audiences recognize across many narratives or as part of a storytelling tradition or convention. Th ...
s. He was also unique among other Spanish western authors in that he ''had'' visited the American west he was writing about.


Death and legacy

Lafuente Estefanía died on August 7, 1984, in Madrid. His sons and later a grandson continued to write novels under the same name, still published by
Ediciones B Ediciones B is a Spanish publisher, which currently operates as a division of Penguin Random House. Ediciones B is headquartered in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain; with branches throughout Latin America. It was established in 1986, but has its orig ...
(Bruguera's rebranded name after its acquisition by Grupo Zeta). Adding all hands behind it, the house name "M.L. Estefanía" is estimated to have sold fifty million books as of 2007. In an interview in 2008, Federico Lafuente Beorlegui, last surviving son of Marcial, explained he continued to write one novel a week, now released under the family's own imprint, Cíes. According to him, the Latino population of the U.S. are currently the biggest consumers of Spanish westerns.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lafuente, Marcial category:1903 births category:1984 deaths category:Spanish writers category:Western (genre) writers