The University of Iowa Libraries

Chilean author José Donoso Yanez was born October 5, 1924, to José Donoso and Alicia Yanez. His largely middle class upbringing included ten years of schooling at The Grange, a private school in Santiago, and a private English teacher. After initially leaving high school to travel in the south of Chile and Buenos Aires, Donoso returned to Santiago to complete his studies and entered the Universidad de Chile to study English language and literature. He was awarded a scholarship from the Doherty Foundation in 1949, which enabled him to continue his studies at Princeton University, where he and others founded a literary magazine, MSS.
 
Donoso returned to Santiago in 1952, where he was a journalist for five years and acted briefly as literary critic for Ercilla. Moving to Buenos Aires in 1958, Donoso met Maria del Pilar Serrano, a painter and translator, whom he married in 1961. The couple adopted a daughter, Pilar. The Donosos went to Mexico in 1964 to participate in a writers' congress sponsored by the American Foundation. During his time in Mexico, Donoso wrote literary criticism for Siempre.
 
After leaving Mexico, Donoso and his wife traveled between the United States and Spain. Donoso taught writing at the University of Iowa in 1965-1966, and the family eventually settled in Spain until returning to Chile in the early 1980's. He spent the remainder of his life writing in Chile until his death on December 7, 1996. His wife followed him in death on February 16, 1997.

Donoso's publishing history is well documented and thoroughly discussed in many venues. This collection provides notebooks, correspondence and typescripts that detail the development of some of Donoso's most significant works. Among the titles for which there are related materials are Coronacion, El Obsceno Pajaro de la Noche, Este Domingo, Paula Mancheno, El Lugar sin Limites, and several short stories. This material is organized in Series I and II.
 
The materials relating to El Obsceno Pajaro de la Noche have been given particular attention.  Those associated with manuscript drafts (Box 3 folders 1-6) were closely inventoried by Gonzalo Campos-Dintrans in July 2007. Notebooks 15-32 are key documentation for Donoso's development of this novel; they were examined carefully by Maria Laura Bocaz in 2007-2008 and she used the results in her doctoral dissertation (2010).  Her detailed notes, lightly edited, appear on the Notebooks inventory while a brief summary appears below.  Bocaz also compiled the notes on the other notebooks recorded here.
 
The collection also includes significant correspondence from numerous writers to Donoso. The correspondence is primarily arranged alphabetically. Box 16 contains letters from Donoso to Maria Pilar written during their courtship, 1958-1961.
 
Literary rights are held by Donoso's estate.
 
There are two separate indexes available to this collection: a classified index by genre and an index of Donoso's correspondents.

Alternate Extent Statement: Photographs boxes 1, 13

Access: This collection is open for research.

Use: Copyright restrictions may apply; please consult Special Collections staff for further information.

Acquisition: Purchase and gift from José Donoso in 1966 and 1967.

Preferred Citation: Jose Donoso Papers, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

Repository:	University of Iowa Special Collections
Address:	Special Collections Department University of Iowa Libraries Iowa City, IA 52242
Phone:	319-335-5921
Curator:	Greg Prickman
Email:	lib-spec@uiowa.edu
Website:	http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/

This collection is indexed under the following subject terms.

Browse:
English & American Literature
Writers Archive at Iowa
Novelists, Story Writers, & Poets