Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) is generally recognized as Spain’s greatest writer of fiction after Cervantes, ranking amongst the major nineteenth-century Realists alongside Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. He was a prolific writer and his output includes forty-six Episodios Nacionales (“National Episodes”, i.e. historical novels), thirty-two novels, twenty-four plays and the equivalent of twenty volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings.
Galdós was born on 10 May 1843 in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, the youngest of ten children of a middle-class family. His father, Don Sebastián Pérez, was a moderately prosperous ex-soldier who had fought in the War of Independence and his m…
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Citation: Davies, Rhian. "Benito Pérez Galdós". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 December 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5489, accessed 22 November 2024.]
