It is revealed that Miguel de Unamuno confessed to the novelist Henry Miller that he feared being murdered.

The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), in a previously unpublished letter dated December 7, 1936 – three weeks before his death – confessed to the novelist Henry Miller (1891–1980) his fear of being assassinated because there was an order to kill him if he tried to escape from house arrest.

The Unamuno House-Museum in the city of Salamanca, where he was rector of the historic university, has published an important deposit made at the institution by researcher Carlos Sá Mayoral, which includes a letter that Miguel de Unamuno tried to send to the writer Henry Miller in late 1936.

The letter was written on December 7, 1936 by Unamuno in response to another letter (now unknown) that Miller had sent him previously, which shows an unknown epistolary relationship between the two writers.

In the text, Unamuno laments his situation since October 12, when, during the celebration of the so-called Day of the Race in the auditorium of the University of Salamanca, he censured the attitude of the Francoist and Falangist elites, giving rise to his famous confrontation with General Millán Astray, one of the military men closest to Franco.

"Sá Mayoral has published several works, such as 'Miguel de Unamuno: Natural Death or State Crime?' and for the first time directly implicates dictator Francisco Franco in the writer's persecution and death ," the House-Museum indicated.

Unamuno even goes so far as to denounce in the letter the existence of an order to kill him if he tries to flee, describes the terrible situation that existed in Spain dominated by the rebels against the Republic in July 1936 (which caused a civil war until 1939) and asks Miller to tell all this to whoever will listen in Paris, especially among the Spanish exiles.

"The letter has even more historical value because, after being seized by the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), the head of that agency, Colonel Salvador Múgica, submitted a report to General Franco warning of Unamuno's desire to flee abroad, dated just eleven days before the writer's death," indicates the Unamuno House-Museum.

The appearance of this letter is a continuation of the previous contributions to Sá Mayoral's writings, made by the filmmaker Manuel Menchón and the professor at the University of Salamanca and writer Luis García Jambrina ( The Double Death of Unamuno ), also relating to the end of the life of Unamuno, one of the most prestigious writers in Spanish literature.

The letter joins two other documents recently discovered during the documentation process for the exhibition on the links between the former rector of the University of Salamanca and science, which the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit of the University of Salamanca is preparing for next year. Among them is a handwritten note from British novelist H.G. Wells to Unamuno.