Delibes is ideologically characterized by an open-minded and demanding Christian humanism, committed to the problems of its time. From these postulates, he sharply criticizes the bourgeois society. He considers society's advancement and technical progress was made at the expense of the individual's freedom, being in itself a subjugation rather than a liberating force. This gloomy perspective about material progress makes him frequently turn his eyes to nature as a source for the positive, to the simple life of the people of the countryside, among whom he finds, despite so many miseries, undestroyed redoubts of human dignity. The two aspects of bourgeois life and rural life constitute the axes on which he has built his literary work. He is a man striving for the simplicity of the small town spirit in opposition to the dehumanized city,  consciously choosing the love of nature, the countryside, and the rural world in the face of the false progress of modern life.

The author has exceptional storytelling skills and remarkable insight to portrait in his novels different types of people and environments. His remarkable command of the language lets him easily move between the most varied registers of the language: educated, popular, pedantic, simple, childish, rural, etc. A very prominent feature of his prose is the wealth of vocabulary about nature and life in the country. The way in which he makes the peasants who abound in his works speak is hardly comparable. He confidently masters the rural Castilian language, with a stale and juicy flavor, with an attitude devoid of great intellectual concerns when writing, with a kind of poetic realism (as opposed to analytical realism) achieved through the selective and repetitive technique of features.

He became known when he won the Nadal Prize in 1947 with his work The shadow of the cypress is long, an existentialist novel impregnated by themes such as anguish, unhappiness, and death. In his work El camino (1950) he constructs a clean approach to the reality of life in a small town, meticulously building an unforgettable world of people in its most varied human types, his prose so ascetically refined that the reading produces an impression of real life. In the experimental format of the novel, Five Hours with Mario (1966), the writer develops the character of a woman watching over her dead husband while sustaining a long, critical, and exacerbating interior monologue. The woman's words reveal a lucid dissection of her narrow-minded and traditional mentality, reflected on her complaints, obsessions, and opposing values ​​of the deceased husband. Also notable is the work Parabola de un náufrago (1969), where the author presents an individual lost in the internal mechanisms of a big corporation who ends up being the victim of a monstrous punishment for daring to openly reflect on the philosophical meaning of his role, the technical innovations in the writing distorts accordingly the reality, with a language that supports and encompass the social criticism. 

La sombra del ciprés es alargada

Diario de un cazador

Las ratas

Los santos inocentes

Cinco horas con mario

El hereje

Five hours with Mario deals with the long monologue (5 hours) of Carmen during the wake of her husband, Mario. Carmen's meditations revolve around her frustration at not understanding her husband, nor having shared any of the topics that interested him. The text, like the entire book, is a masterful example of reproducing colloquial language. It is here that the author manages to do justice to the much-criticized character of Mario. The reader, although he only hears criticism about the husband, ends up making his own judgment in favor of Mario, in the face of Carmen's narrow-mindedness.

Narrative

In 1970  was published the poetic anthology Nueve novisimos poetas españoles (Nine Newest Spanish Poets), giving the name to this literary movement that is made up of authors who for the most part did not experience the Spanish Civil War. These authors are more interested in writing for a consumer society,  themselves very influenced by elements of the more opulent society of consumerism,  such as comics, movies, and different types of modern music, particularly jazz, and rock. This is definitely a movement of renewal of the literary technique, with a detachment from the previous social realism and an approach to contemporary European and American literary trends. 

In prose, the change is announced by Martín Santos's novel, Tiempo de silencio, where the author makes compatible the still social denunciation with a technical renewal of style and experimentation. For these authors the subject is not as important as the style, placing themselves in a refreshing and avant-garde line. Some will experiment with surrealism, others with an aesthetic refinement that came to be called Venetian, and finally, others are attracted to a decadent and a neo-modernist aesthetic.

Post Civil War Generation

Gerardo Diego publishes  a book of poems,Alondra de verdad.

Camilo José Cela writes La familia de Pascual Duarte, a family story that reflects the existential pessimism that postwar Spain was experiencing.

Pio Baroja writes a recollection of his memories entitled Desde la última vuelta del camino.

Luis Rosales writes La casa encendida, a book of poems in which he   describes different vital stages under the philosophical background of the irreversibility of time and the existential pain of a life split into unrelated pieces.

Publication of Candide, by Voltaire. Candide is living a sheltered but indoctirinated life.

Albert Camus writes Le Étranger, an existentialist novel that reflects on the absurdity of life.

Alberto Moravia writes The conformist,  a daring novel pleading against the mechanisms of the totalitarian state.

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Cinco horas con Mario

By Miguel Delibes Stién

Time Period: Post Civil War Generation

Genre: Narrative

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