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Edited by James Valender, José García-Velasco, Tatiana Aguilar-Álvarez Bay, and Trilce Arroyo, led by José García-Velasco and James Valender

Co-published by Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes and Fundación Unicaja

Alberto Jiménez Fraud (Málaga, 1883-Geneva, 1964) was the director of the Residencia de Estudiantes from its foundation in 1910 until 1936, by which time it had become, according to Julio Caro Baroja, “the first cultural center of Spain”. Thanks to the almost two thousand letters collected in this edition, we know what situations Jiménez Fraud faced, when, at only twenty-seven years old, he took charge of the Residencia, and the people with whom he shared this task. Throughout those decades, in which he mentored several generations of university students (Severo Ochoa, Dalí, García Lorca and Buñuel among many other extraordinary residents), some of the most distinguished intellectuals, scientists, and international creators of that time, such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Walter Gropius, Paul Valéry and Alexander Calder, put forward their theories and presented their works at the Residencia. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced the Residencia to stop its activity and Jiménez Fraud into exile with his family in England, where, from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, he continued fighting until his death for the revival of this project, the Residencia, a project that is alive again today.

This collection of letters offers new information about the plan to modernise Spanish society promoted by Francisco Giner de los Ríos and the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, of which the Residencia was part, and about the process of its revival in post-war Spain. In both periods –the cultural splendour, and then the internal and external exile that followed–, the letters, through their correspondents, present a panorama of the culture of the twentieth century. Some of the protagonists of Spanish and European intellectual history feature in the pages of this book: friends and relatives of Jiménez Fraud like his master Francisco Giner de los Ríos –with whom the epistolary opens–, Manuel B. Cossío, José Moreno Villa, Zenobia Camprubí, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Natalia Cossío, and Gloria Giner, together with Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Falla, Ramón y Cajal, Menéndez Pidal, María de Maeztu, Américo Castro…, and even the youngest Caro Baroja or Valente.

Box containing 3 volumes of 14 x 21,5 cm.
ISBN (complete work): 978-84-946717-2-2
Volume I: 1.016 pp.
Volume II: 1.200 pp.
Volume III: 1.044 pp.