The World of Rony V. Diaz’s Fiction is where the usual categories of good and evil have irrepressibility of instinct. Here a man might try to make his intellect prevail and so acquire a certain sense of freedom, but he soon discovers that he has simply rationalized the inevitability of his surrender to the primal drives of his animal body. So it is that the men and the boys (the women in these stories are merely sketches in the background) in such a world evoke our pity–they make little gestures that seek to establish their humanity in a universe that, sooner or later, denies their claim.
The pessimism of Rony V. Diaz is characteristic of the temper of English writing by Filipinos in the decade of the 1950s. In a few of the young writers of the period, pessimism was a fashionable pose imitated from modern Western fictionists they read in literary workshops. But for many of the poets and fictionists of this period, it was a defensive philosophical stance in “a world [they] never made”. So there was an inward turning among the young writers in the 1950s. The finely honed craftsmanship with which Rony V. Diaz gave shape to youthful despair was his way of making peace with a world that could not provide him with a less bleak alternative to english.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rony V. Diaz was born in 1932 in Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija, but grew up in Mindoro. He studied English Literature at the University of the Philippines, where he graduated in 1953. In 1959, he studied Comparative Literature at Indiana University on a Fulbright and Smith-Mundt grant. In 1960 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. Diaz won the Carlos Palanca Award three times for his short stories. Diaz was Director General of the National Manpower Youth Council of the Department of Labor, as well as Chairman of the Board on Textbooks of the Department of Education and Culture. Until he retired in 1981, he was an official of the International Labour Office (ILO).