Barbara Probst Solomon, writer who chronicled Franco’s rule in Spain, dies, 90

Barbara Probst Solomon, a novelist, essayist and cultural critic who chronicled her youthful opposition to Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, including her involvement in an audacious mission to free political prisoners, died Sept. 1 at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.

The cause was renal disease, said her daughters, Maria Solomon and Carla Solomon Magliocco.

Raised with wealth and privilege on New York’s Upper East Side, Solomon rejected college and a straightforward career when she struck out for post-World War II Europe at 19. After traveling to Paris by boat, she befriended a young Norman Mailer, fell in love with a Spanish freedom fighter and helped liberate two resistance members from a gulag near Madrid, then returned to the United States to become a journalist and novelist.

Her 1960 literary debut, “The Beat of Life,” was a first-person, present-tense account of a timid young woman’s unexpected pregnancy, and it drew praise from critics and authors such as James Baldwin. “It’s an extraordinary piece of work,” he said. “She’s an amazingly gifted writer and it’s a very moving and exact study of – what shall I call it? – the death of love, the hideously whistling space where all our values used to be.”

Solomon went on to raise two daughters, in large part as a single mother, while writing for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s magazine, Vogue and the Spanish journal Cambio 16, in addition to serving as a longtime cultural correspondent for the Madrid newspaper El Pais.

“There is an enticing quirkiness about her writing; she has strong but not mean-spirited opinions that often surprise with their offbeat approach, good humor and good sense,” wrote New York Times journalist Herbert Mitgang, reviewing her essay collection “Horse-Trading and Ecstasy” (1989).