Juan Marichal

Who was Juan Marichal?

Juan Marichal was a Spanish-Canarian historian, literary critic and essayist. Marichal also served as a professor at Harvard University. Marichal spent years in exile during the Franco dictatorship following the end of the Spanish Civil War.

Marichal was born on February 2, 1922, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. He moved with his family to Madrid in 1935. However, he soon relocated to both Valencia and Barcelona before attending school in Paris, France. He graduated from French lycee in Casablanca, near the end of the Spanish Civil War.

In 1941, Marichal boarded a ship with other exiles from the Spanish Civil War and sailed from Casablanca to Mexico at just 19 years old. He enrolled at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he studied literature and philosophy. He worked at a box factory as a student to pay for his tuition.

Marichal became a professor at Luis Vives Institute, an organization in Mexico founded by Spaniard exiles. He moved to the United States, where he enrolled as a doctoral student at Princeton University in New Jersey due to a scholarship obtained for him by Edmundo O'Gorman, a Mexican historian and philosopher. Marichal received his doctorate in literature from Princeton University in 1949.