Biography

He was born on 8 September 1915 in Romblon, Philippines. Gonzlez, however, was raised in Calapan City, the capital of the Philippine province of Oriental Mindoro. Gonzlez was a son of a school supervisor and a teacher. As a teenager, he helped his father by delivering meat door-to-door across provincial villages and municipalities. Gonzlez was also a musician. He played the violin and even made four guitars by hand. He earned his first peso by playing the violin during a Chinese funeral in Romblon. Gonzlez attended Mindoro High School (now Jose J. Leido Jr. Memorial National High School) from 1927 to 1930. Gonzlez attended college at National University (Manila) but he was unable to finish his undergraduate degree. While in Manila, Gonzlez wrote for the Philippine Graphic and later edited for the Evening News Magazine and Manila Chronicle. His first published essay appeared in the Philippine Graphic and his first poem in Poetry in 1934. Gonzlez made his mark in the Philippine writing community as a member of the Board of Advisers of Likhaan: the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center, founding editor of The Diliman Review and as the first president of the Philippine Writers' Association. Gonzlez attended creative writing classes underWallace Stegner and Katherine Anne Porter at Stanford University. In 1950, Gonzlez returned to the Philippines and taught at the University of Santo Tomas, thePhilippine Women's University and the University of the Philippines (U.P.). At U.P., Gonzlez was only one of two faculty members accepted to teach in the university without holding a degree. On the basis of his literary publications and distinctions, Gonzlez later taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara,California State University, Hayward, the University of Washington, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Gonzalez is buried at theLibingan ng mga Bayani.

On 14 April 1987, the University of the Philippines conferred on N.V.M. Gonzlez the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, "For his creative genius in shaping the Philippine short story and novel, and making a new clearing within the English idiom and tradition on which he established an authentic vocabulary, ...For his insightful criticism by which he advanced the literary tradition of the Filipino and enriched the vocation for all writers of the present generation...For his visions and auguries by which he gave the Filipino sense and sensibility a profound and unmistakable script read and reread throughout the international community of letters..." N.V.M. Gonzlez was proclaimed National Artist of the Philippines in 1997. He died on 28 November 1999 in Quezon City,Philippines at the age of 84. As a National Artist, Gonzalez was honored with a state funeral at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

"Literature is an affair of letters," N.V.M. Gonzalez once said. A teacher, author, journalist and essayist,
Gonzalez is one of the most widely recognized, anthologized and closely studied among Filipino writers. His most notable works include the novels The Winds of April, The Bamboo Dancers and A Season of Grace, short story collections Children of the AshCovered Loam and The Bread of Salt and Other Stories and essay collections Work on the Mountain and The Novel of Justice: Selected Essays. Gonzalez distinctively wrote of the Filipino life, of the Filipino in the world. Gonzalez is himself a Filipino in the world, traversing between the United States and the Philippines and exploring Europe and Asia. The affair of letters Gonzalez created is more than literature. It is the story of a Filipino in the world. It is his story. Nestor Vicente Madali Gonzalez, familiarly known as simply "N.V.M.," was born on September 8, 1915 in Romblon, Romblon and moved to Mindoro at the age of five. The son of a school supervisor and a teacher, Gonzalez helped his father by delivering meat door-to-door. Gonzalez attended Mindoro High School from 1927 to 1930, and although he studied at National University in Manila, he never obtained a degree. While in Manila, Gonzalez wrote for the Philippine Graphic and later edited for the Evening News Magazine and Manila Chronicle. His first published essay appeared in the Philippine Graphic and his first poem in Poetry in 1934. A Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, awarded to Gonzalez in 1948, allowed the aspiring author to travel to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California and Columbia University in New York City. While at Stanford, Gonzalez attended lectures and classes from many prominent writers, Wallace Stegner and Katherine Anne Porter amongst them. After Gonzalez returned to the Philippines in 1950, he began a long teaching career, beginning with a position at the University of Santo Tomas. Gonzalez also taught at the Philippine Women's University, but it was the lengthy position at the University of the Philippines that gave distinction to Gonzalez's career - as a teacher at the university for 18 years, Gonzalez was only one of two people to teach there without holding a degree. Gonzalez hosted the first University of the Philippines writer's workshop with a group who would soon form the Ravens. In addition, Gonzalez made his mark in the writing community as a member of the Board of Advisers of Likhaan: the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center, founder The Diliman Review and as the first president of the Philippine Writers' Association. Gonzalez continued to teach when he returned to California in the 1960s, serving as a visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara; professor emeritus at California State University, Hayward; and professor at University of California at Los Angeles' Asian American Studies Center and English department. Throughout Gonzalez's teaching career, the author produced 14 books and accumulated many awards along the way. Through these writings, Gonzalez received many prestigious awards, including repeated Palanca Memorial Award for Literature awards, the Jose Rizal Pro Patria Award, and the City of Manila Medal of Honor. In addition, his books became internationally recognized, and his works have been translated into Chinese, German, Russian and Bahasa Indonesian. Gonzalez received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Philippines in 1987 and became its first international writer in residence in 1988. He served as the 1998-1999 Regents Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and continued to receive distinctions such as the National Artist Award for Literature in 1997 and the Centennial Award for Literature in 1998. In 1990 and 1996, "N.V.M. Gonzalez Days" were celebrated in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. Despite Gonzalez's travels, he never gave up his Filipino citizenship. Critics feared that Gonzalez would someday settle into the Filipino-American genre of literature, but Gonzalez often pointed out with an all-familiar twinkle in his eye, "I never left home." True to his word, the home that shaped Gonzalez's days is present in his writings, from the blossoming of a love story to the culture reflected in an immigrant experience. N.V.M. started his career at the age of 19; 65 years later, he was still creating affairs with letters. He passed away on November 28, 1999, due to kidney complications. He was 84. N.V.M. Gonzalez is remembered as an innovative writer, a dedicated and humble worker and an honest witty friend. He will be dearly missed.

"For the good of my soul lately I have been reading Jose Rizal and as much as I admire Mr. Rizal's political sentiments, I must say I prefer Gonzalez as a novelist." -Wallace Stegner, 1950

What is 'bread of salt' story by nestor vicente madali gonzalez all about?
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It is about coming to the "real life." The young boy pushed aside down-to-earth life and sought dreams that could simply not come true.

The protagonists in Gonzalez's stories are often young people on the cusp, on the brink of change. Born of a family practicing slash-and-burn farming, Tarang, a boy of seven, realizes for the first time the inexpressible connection of land to life, associating his mother giving birth with rice in "the ash-covered loam, thrusting forth . . . tender stalks." After the Japanese occupation in WWII, a grade-school teacher aptly named Miss Inocencio must reconcile the skull of her lover, disinterred from the well behind her school, with her post-war reality. An immigrant student coming to America on a fellowship - perhaps a thinly disguised version of Gonzalez himself arriving at Stanford in 1949 - concocts a paranoid fantasy that the man who offers him a ride from the port of Oakland to San Francisco is a robber prepared to fling him from the Bay Bridge. Continually, Gonzalez's Pilipino characters find themselves awash in sociopolitical (under)currents, jetsam in a postcolonial ocean. A graduate student exiled to the US by the Marcos regime withdraws into idyllic memories of his island childhood but remembers also oppression and poverty; nevertheless, he finds hope in the lasting memory of a "lizard . . . mottled green and gold, aglow in the sun." Gonzalez's craft as a writer similarly betrays a colonialized duality. In his preface, Gonzalez asserts, "In the Philippines, colonization made us into a truly submerged people"; thus his subject is constantly Pilipino, a continual project to unearth what is essential and native from underneath the American and Spanish overlays. Nevertheless, all of Gonzalez's writing is in English, and so language is a prominent (pre)occupation; even an "alien language," he asserts, "does not fail if it is employed in honest service to the scene, in evocation of the landscape, and in celebration of the people one has known from birth." More important, however, Gonzalez's prose style and narrative poetics unabashedly proceed from modernist British and American models. Gonzalez claims that "at Stanford . . . my classmates were reading Henry James [while] I toiled away to re-create Mindoro" (his native island), but his fictional constructions nonetheless echo precisely Henry James, particularly in a predilection for exploring psychological states. Another obvious influence is early James Joyce. The book's title story, "The Bread of Salt," mirrors Joyce's "Araby" in plot and theme: a young violinist, enamored of a mestiza beauty, gets a chance to impress her by playing at a party at her house, but only embarrasses himself at the buffet table. What makes Gonzalez's story crowningly Pilipino, however, is the reference to pan de sal, "bread of salt" - an allusion that embeds the violinist in a long-standing tradition of young Pilipinos sent each morning to the corner bakery to buy pan de sal for the family's breakfast.

The Bread of Salt

The Bread of Salt is a short story that was written by N. V. M. Gonzalez in 1958. Written in the first person, it tells of a simple fourteen-year-old boy who is infatuated with the niece of a rich plantation owner. [edit]

Synopsis

The first-person narrator tells of his attraction to his mestiza classmate Aida, whose uncle's mansion he would see whenever he went to the bakery for pan de sal("the bread of salt"). But an embarrassing incident during a party for Aida's relatives makes him feel that Aida sees him as an inferior. He avoids her afterwards and, despite having partaken of the many delicacies at the party, decides to get pan de sal to eat after leaving the party. This suggests his return to his simple routine life after losing his obsession with Aida.

Selected Works

A Grammar of Dreams and Other Stories. University of the Philippines Press, 1997. The Winds of April. Reissue, University of the Philippines Press, 1997. A Novel of Justice: Selected Essays 1968-1994. Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts and Anvil (popular edition), 1996. Work on the Mountain. Includes The Father and the Maid, Essays on Filipino Life and Letters andKalutang: A Filipino in the World, University of the Philippines Press, 1996. The Bread of Salt and Other Stories. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993; University of the Philippines Press, 1993. Mindoro and Beyond: Twenty-one Stories. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1981; New Day, 1989 (emended edition). Selected Stories. Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1964. Look, Stranger, on this Island Now. Manila: Benipayo, 1963. The Bamboo Dancers. Manila: Benipayo, 1957; first published in full in Diliman Review and Manila Times Sunday Magazine (three-part serial); Alan Swallow, 1961; Russian translation, 1964; Manila: Bookmark Filipino Literary Classics, 1992.

A Season of Grace. Manila: Benipayo, 1956; Russian translation, 1974; Malaysian translation, 1988; Bookmark Filipino Literary Classics, 1992. Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories. Manila: Benipayo, 1954; Bookmark Filipino Literary Classics, 1992. Seven Hills Away. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947. The Winds of April. Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1941.

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Awards

Philippines Centennial Award for Literature, 1998. National Artist Award for Literature, 1997. Oriental Mindoro Sangguniang Panlalawigan Resolution "extending due recognition to Nestor V. M. Gonzalez... the commendation he well deserves..." 1996. City of Manila Diwa ng Lahi award "for his service and contribution to Philippine national Literature," 1996. City of Los Angeles resolution declaring October, 11, 1996 "N.V.M. Gonzalez Day, 1996. The Asian Catholic Publishers Award, 1993. The Filipino Community of California Proclamation "honoring N.V.M. Gonzalez for seventy-eight years of achievements," 1993. Ninoy Aquino Movement for Social and Economic Reconstruction through Volunteer Service award, 1991. City and County of San Francisco proclamation of March 7, 1990 "Professor N.V.M. Gonzalez Day in San Francisco," 1990. Cultural Center of the Philippines award, Gawad Para sa Sining, 1990. The Union of Writers of the Philippines award, Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas, 1989. University of the Philippines International Writer-in-Residence, 1988. University of the Philippines degree, Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris Causa), 1987. Djerassi Foundation Artist-in-Residency, 1986. Philippine Foreign Service Certificate of Appreciation for Work in the International Academic and Literary Community, at San Francisco, 1983. California State University Award, Emeritus Professor of English, 1982. Palanca Memorial short story award, First Prize for 'The Tomato Game,' 1971. City of Manila Medal of Honor, 1971. Awarded Liverhume Fellowship, University of Hong Kong, 1969. Visiting Associate Professorship in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1968. British Council award for Travel to England, 1965. Intemaciones Award for Travel in the Federal German Republic, 1965. Philippines Free Press First Prize Award winner for 'Serenade,' 1964. Rockefeller Writing Grant and Travel in Europe, 1964. Jose Rizal Pro-Patria Award for The Bamboo Dancers, 1961. Republic Cultural Heritage Award for The Bamboo Dancers, 1960. Palanca Memorial short story award, Third Prize winner for 'On the Ferry,' 1959. Philippine Free Press Third Prize winner for 'On the Ferry,' 1959. Republic Award of Merit for "the advancement of Filipino culture in the field of English Literature," 1954. Palanca Memorial short story award, Second Prize winner for 'Lupo and the River,' 1953. Rockefeller Foundation Study and Travel fellowship to India and the Far East, 1952. Palanca Memorial short story award, Second Prize winner for 'Children of the Ash-covered Loam,' 1952. Rockefeller Writing Fellowship to Stanford, Kenyon School of English, and Columbia University, 1949-1950. Liwayway Short Story Contest, Third Prize winner for 'Lunsod, Nayon at Dagat-dagatan,' 1943. First Commonwealth Literary Contest honorable mention for 'The Winds of April,' 1940.

NVM INC.

Founded in 1998, the year of NVM's death, N.V.M. Inc. is a Philippine non-profit organization established to honor the works of NVM Gonzalez and continue the literary legacy he left behind by conducting short story workshops, writing competitions, and various artistic events. Since 1999, the NVM Awards has given $1000.00 (P50,000) to several writers. Much of the Award money comes from generous donations from friends, family, artists, and businessmen. The NVM Awards are hosted at the University of the Philippines, Diliman campus every November 28th, to honor NVM's death anniversary. Judges are selected on the basis of their knowledge and understanding of NVM's writing philosophy and style. Over the years, several writers and critics have served as judges: Gemino Abad, the late Doreen Fernandez, the late Nieves Espistola, Greg Brillantes, Cirilio Bautista, and Neal Cruz. The judges review an average of fifteen to twenty published short-stories. A top prize is given to the best story. For 2005, the category unpublished short-story and critical essay will be included for Award review.