Joan Navais brings us closer to the figure of Josep Maria Prous i Vila, literary and republican intellectual Catalan from Reus. With unpublished documentary sources and a wide range of his literary and journalistic production, Joan Navais achieves a biographical study that combines the vital trajectory of Josep Maria Prous i Vila with the political history of Catalonia during the 20th century, marked by the Republic, the Civil War and the Franco regime, which led to the exile of a large part of the republican political class, which Josep Maria Prous i Vila was part of.
The object of the study is to detail the years of formation of the humanistic, ideological and literary career of the poet Josep M. Prous i Vila, born in Reus in 1899 and died in exile, in Perpignan, in 1978. Self-taught and of artisan origins, Prous was part of the generation that made possible the democratic rupture of April 14, 1931 and the enlargement of the foundations of republican Catalonia. Although some works that had already outlined the work and the life trajectory of Prous i Vila, a much more complete and profound biographical study that ended up defining the literary value and ideology of the Reus poet was missing.
The life of Prous was not easy. In the summer of 1921 the Spanish army led him reluctantly to fight in the mountains and in the desert valleys of the Rif, in one of the bloodiest colonial conflicts in the history of Spain. And after a few years, in 1926 the stupor and coldness of Reus pushed him to move to Barcelona to make his way in the world of Catalan letters and away from the literary and professional drowning. In 1939, however, Prous suffered the hardest and most painful blow when the fascist triumph forced him into exile.
The work and the cultural initiatives of Prous fill some of the most interesting pages of literature Reus, and also Catalan, the first third of the twentieth century: the avant-garde brochure La Columna de Foc (closely related to the futuristic publication of Joan Salvat-Papasseit Un Enemic del Poble) the satirical and futuristic magazine Reus 1973, the book of poems Infantaments (that fits fully in the Noucentisme movement characteristics), the “Breviari” of Fleury at the Reus newspaper, or later, the work of Quatre gotes de sang, dietary of a catalan at Morroco wich gathers his experiences in the Rif War. Likewise, Prous endeavored to encourage reciprocal exchange and connection between the intellectual center of Catalonia (Barcelona) and the periphery (the “comarques”) in order to articulate the desired “Catalonia-city” and normalize Catalan culture. Therefore, in Reus, he liaised with writers from outside to promote their knowledge and exchanges. And in Barcelona, he divulged the social and cultural reality of the Camp de Tarragona.
