De Pereda, Prudencio, 1912-

Spanish American author.

Prudencio De Pereda was born in Brooklyn, New York's Spanish colony on February 18, 1912, to Spanish immigrant parents. He was first encouraged to be a writer after reading Ernest Hemingway as an undergraduate Spanish major at City College of New York (1929-1933). He published his first story in 1936, and during the Spanish Civil War, met Hemingway. The two collaborated on the commentary for the films Spain in Flames and The Spanish Earth, espousing the Loyalist Republican viewpoint. During this seminal period of De Pereda's writing, his activities brought him into contact with a number of other young New York literati who were similarly affected by the war in Spain and other “radical” causes.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, De Pereda wrote short stories that were published in several small circulation magazines, as well as in better-known periodicals such as Commentary, New Republic, Story, and Nation. De Pereda's stories have been anthologized often, and appeared in the O. Henry Memorial Prize Volume (1937) and O'Brien's Best Short Stories (1938, 1940).

From 1941-1944, De Pereda served in the U.S. Army as a Spanish language censor of letters for the U.S. Bureau of Censorship. After World War II he worked as an advertising copywriter and later as a librarian. During this time De Pereda began combining and expanding his stories, producing three novels: All the Girls We Loved (1948), Fiesta (1953), and Windmills in Brooklyn (1960). Fiesta became his best known work, having been published in Canada, England, France, Finland, and the German Democratic Republic. Robert Hanell set it to music as an opera, and it has been adapted as a radio play. De Pereda also translated from the Spanish, Alberto Gerchunoff's Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas in 1953.

De Pereda retired to Sunbury, Pennsylvania.