Best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Bienvenido Santos was also a poet, memoirist, and autobiographer.

He was born in Manila, studied in the U.S. at Columbia Univ., Harvard, and the Univ. of Illinois, and has taught at universites in the U.S. and the Philippines. His fiction falls into two groups: one focuses on life in the Philippines, and the other on the experience of the Filipino immigrant to the U.S. His novel The Praying Man (1982), which describes corruption in the Philippines, was controversial in the country of his birth and banned by then-president Marcos. His short story "Immigration Blues," in his collection Scent of Apples, won the award for fiction from New Letters in 1977. Since the Philippines was a colony of the U.S. from 1899 to 1946, there is a continuum between literary works in English written in the Philippines and works by Filipino-Americans, as Santos' career well illustrates. Fililpino literature often takes as a backdrop events from Philippine history that are also part of the U.S. historical past, including the Philippine American War, World War II, the Japanese occupation of the Philippines; in addition, many contemporary Filipino-American writers were born in the Philippines.