Ruedo Ibérico, the leading anti-Franco exiled publishing house based in Paris. Sold clandestinely in Spain, its impact obliged the then information minister, Manuel Fraga, to set up a department dedicated to modernising the State's historiography. Its director, Ricardo de la Cierva, later Spain's minister of culture (1980-1981), went on to write 80 books in defence of Francoist Spain. In 1965, Southworth wrote a second book, Antifalange, on how Franco converted the Falange into the single party of his State. Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History (1977) deals with the effort by Franco's propagandists and admirers to wipe out the atrocity at Guernica. Two years before its publication, and on the advice of the French historian, Pierre Vilar, the manuscript had been successfully presented by Southworth as his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. In the mid-1970s, Southworth became Regents Professor at the University of California. A pugnacious polemicist, he regularly took part in literary arguments, most notably with Burnett Bolloten and Hugh Thomas. In 1970, he sold his collection of documents to the University of California. He had once told Paul Preston that he would like the epitaph on his gravestone to read, "His writings were not Holy Writ, but neither were they wholly shit." Only three days before his death, he delivered what Preston describes as a more fitting epitaph: the manuscript of Conspiracy and the Spanish Civil War: The Brainwashing of Francisco Franco, published by Routledge. He died on 30 October 1999 in a medical centre of Le Blanc, close to Saint-Benoît-du-Sault (Indre), the French village where Southworth had lived his last two decades. References Bibliography Preston, Paul. (2009) We saw Spain die. Foreign correspondents in the Spanish Civil War. Constable. London. 1999 deaths 1908 births People from Blaine County, Oklahoma Historians of Spain American Hispanists American expatriates in Algeria American expatriates in Morocco