Francisco Ayala; Spanish novelist, sociologist, scholar spent years in exile

Mr. Ayala’s foundation said he died of natural causes at his home in Madrid.

Mr. Ayala won many prestigious prizes in Spain, from the Cervantes award, considered the Spanish-language equivalent of the Nobel for literature, in 1991 to the Prince of Asturias in 1998.

His life as a young man turned into a flight from the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

At the outbreak of the conflict in 1936, Mr. Ayala, a law professor and a regular contributor to intellectual magazines, was in Buenos Aires on a lecture tour. He returned to work for the Spanish Republican government but, three years later, as Franco’s troops entered Barcelona and the war was all but over, Mr. Ayala took the route of many Spanish intellectuals, exile in America.

Mr. Ayala had published his first book, “Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espiritu’’ (Tragicomedy of a Man Without Spirit), in 1925 and received a doctorate in law from Madrid University in 1930.

In Buenos Aires, he taught sociology and founded the literary and cultural magazine “Reality,’’ publishing works by Argentine and Spanish writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Juan Ramon Jimenez.

He then moved to Puerto Rico in 1950, where he founded the respected cultural magazine, “La Torre.’’

In 1955, he began a 20-year stint in the United States, working at Princeton, Rutgers, New York University, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Chicago, and City University of New York.

Many of his most outstanding books stem from the years he spent in exile, including “Los Usurpadores’’ (“The Usurpers’’) of 1949, in which he examines the immorality of a person subjugating another to his will. “La Cabeza del Cordero’’ (The Lamb’s Head) is a collection of short stories on similar themes centering on the Spanish Civil War.

Mr. Ayala, who returned to Spain in 1975, the year Franco died, delved into ways of reconciling individual conscience with society and applying ancient moral values to modern times.

The collapse of moral order and the hopelessness of human relations are also common themes in pessimistic and satirical novels such as “Muertes de Perro’’ (Death as a Way of Life) and “El Jardin de Las Delicias’’ (Garden of Delights).

“Spain’s transition [from dictatorship to democracy], the moral reconstruction of this country, would have been more difficult, had it not been inspired by the democratic legacy that was destroyed by the Civil War but which Francisco Mr. Ayala and others like him were able to conserve,’’ Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero once said of him.