Rudolfo Anaya

Rudolfo Anaya is a Mexican-American author. Best known for his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya is considered one of the founders of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature.

Anaya worked as a public school teacher in Albuquerque from 1963 to 1970. In 1966, he married Patricia Lawless, who would serve as his editor over the years. She encouraged him to pursue his literary endeavors, and over a period of seven years, he completed his first novel, Bless Me, Ultima. Dozens of publishing houses rejected the novel. Finally, in 1972, a group of editors at El Grito, a Chicano quarterly, accepted the book. Bless Me, Ultima went on to win the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol award and is now considered a classic Chicano work. It was chosen as one of the books of The Big Read, a community-reading program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. It is also one of the literary works in 2009 of the United States Academic Decathlon. Anaya followed Bless Me, Ultima with Heart of Aztlan (1978) and Tortuga (1979), forming a trilogy.

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