Fernando Arrabal Terán is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist and poet. Arrabal was born in Melilla, Spain, but settled in France in 1955; he describes himself as "desterrado", or "half-expatriate, half-exiled". Arrabal has directed seven full-length feature films; he has published more than 100 plays, 14 novels, 800 poetry collections, chapbooks, and artist's books; several essays, and his notorious "Letter to General Franco" during the dictator's lifetime. His complete plays have been published in a number of languages, in a two-volume edition totaling over two thousand pages. The New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow has called Arrabal the last survivor among the "three avatars of modernism".