Luis Andrés Murillo

Luis Andrés Murillo was an outstanding scholar of Golden Age Spanish literature with a special interest in Miguel de Cervantes. His edition of Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Castalia, 1978, 2 vols., with a companion vol. entitled Bibliografía fundamental) set a new standard of accuracy and thoroughness, accompanied as it was with a voluminous and extremely valuable commentary that presented the work within the context of the development of European literature from the Middle Ages to the present. His contributions to Cervantine studies received signal recognition in On Cervantes: Essays for L.A. Murillo, edited by James A. Parr (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1991), a homage from an international pleiad of Cervantine scholars.

Born in Pasadena (1922), the sixth child and fifth son of parents who fled from Michoacán in 1916 during the Mexican Revolution, Murillo was baptized Luis Andrés, but his name was recorded on his birth certificate as Louis Andrew. Murillo’s father Filomeno (1892-1944) and mother Refugio Martínez-Mejía (1893-1968) were married in Santiago de Conguiripo, in 1911. Murillo attended public schools in his native city and then studied for one year at Pasadena Junior College (1939-1940). He enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1942 and served with the 15th Air Force, 97^th Bomb Group, 341^st Bomb Squadron in Italy as a B-17 ball turret gunner from June 1944 until the end of the war, flying fifty missions from the Amendola airbase on raids over southern Germany and the Balkans and receiving the Air Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters. He drew upon these experiences for a short history, “The Awesome Fifteenth, The Fifteenth Air Force, 1943-45” (2003).

After mustering out as a staff sergeant in September 1945, Murillo enrolled at the University of Southern California on the G.I. bill, earning his B.A. in 1947 in Spanish and Modern European Literature, and his M.A. in 1949 in Spanish Literature with a thesis on “El estoicismo de la novela picaresca” (“Stoicism in the Picaresque Novel”). He received his doctoral degree from Harvard in 1953 in Romance Languages and Literatures with a dissertation on “The Spanish Prose Dialogue of the Sixteenth Century,” directed initially by Amado Alonso and, after Alonso’s death, by Rafael Lapesa and Raimundo Lida. He taught at Harvard as an Instructor in Spanish (1953-1956) and then as Lecturer (1956-1957). In 1958, he was appointed to the same rank in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley, and rose through the ranks until he retired in 1985 as Professor Step V.

Murillo’s early articles drew upon his dissertation, but he soon branched out into studies on modern Latin American and Spanish literature; and, in his first book, The Cyclical Night, Irony in James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges (Harvard University Press, 1968), tackled two of the towering figures of high Modernism. The work of the Argentine fabulist in particular was a favorite topic with Murillo.

At the same time this study foreshadowed his next book, The Golden Dial: Temporal Configuration in Don Quixote (1975), which betrayed a similar preoccupation with issues of chronology in literature as well as his increasing focus on the field of Cervantine studies. However, as one of his department colleagues noted, “to speak of Professor Murillo’s ‘field’ of research is to accept a metaphor which, in his case, is quite inappropriate. Murillo is not quietly tilling a more or less level ‘field’ in a tranquil valley; his instincts drive him to the mountaintops of literary studies … Borges, Joyce, and increasingly, Cervantes.”

Murillo was in fact one of the great Cervantine scholars of his generation, with a score of articles between 1961 and 2009, in addition to a well-received second Cervantes book, A Critical Introduction to Don Quixote (New York: Peter Lang, 1988; rev. ed. 1990), which one reviewer called “highly readable” and “invaluable.” Moreover, he was a tireless promotor of all things Cervantine. At Berkeley he pioneered the teaching of Don Quijote in English and organized a symposium on Cervantes and the Literature of Spain’s Golden Age. He was the founder in 1976, of the Cervantes Society of California and one of the founding members of the Cervantes Society of America two years later. In his honor the Cervantes Society of America still awards the “Luis Andrés Murillo Best Article of the Year.”

In retirement Murillo continued his notable and at times engagingly idiosyncratic scholarly productivity (e.g., “The Children of Clarence King,” “Charles Darwin, the Scientist as Writer,” “The Universe of Sound,” “Twentieth Century Music,” “Vita George Santayana, 1863-1952 : an American Philosopher in Exile”) while also undertaking a program of publications intended to serve as a bridge between the Hispanic community and the public safety forces of the city and county of Los Angeles. He wrote Spanish-language guides for police personnel and brochures on traffic safety and rules of the road for Spanish speakers, including everything from standard terms for freeway traffic and common types of road signs to descriptions of how to behave if stopped by a police officer. Murillo was also a prolific poet, with more than a dozen self-published anthologies of his own work dating from the 1950s through the last years of his life.

In 1985 he donated his exceptionally rich personal library of four thousand volumes to the University of Southern California. In April 1989, the USC Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Doheny Memorial Library sponsored a symposium on the topic of “Cervantes, clásico y contemporáneo” as an academic tribute to him. The symposium became a regular scholarly event under the title Southern California Cervantes Symposium (renamed in 2005 as the Cervantes Symposium of California), drawing major scholars from around the world.

We remember Luis as a quiet, unassuming, reserved colleague, always friendly and courteous to everyone. He was an effective and inspiring teacher with a devoted following among both undergraduate and graduate students. His courses on Cervantes incorporated his own research while in turn contributing to it, while his own bilingual upbringing informed his courses on lower- and upper-division courses on bilingualism, Hispanic culture, and advanced grammar and composition. His service to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese was exemplary. In the 1970s he played a significant role in the re-structuring of the department’s graduate programs.

In preparing this essay we wish to acknowledge the assistance of the touching eulogy of James A. Parr, "Remembering L. A. Murillo (1922-2020)," Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, vol. 40.1, spring 2020, pp. 11-15.

A life-long bachelor, Louis was survived by his brother David, of Reno, NV, as well as descendants of his siblings.

Charles B. Faulhaber
Jerry R. Craddock
2022