Benito Pérez Galdós

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843 –1920) was a Spanish realist novelist. He was the leading literary figure in 19th-century Spain, and some scholars consider him second only to Miguel de Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist.

Pérez Galdós was a prolific writer, publishing 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He remains popular in Spain, and is considered as equal to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. Some of his works have been translated into English, as he has slowly become popular in the Anglophone world.

He came to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912, but his anticlericalism caused him to be successfully boycotted by the most conservative sectors of Spanish society, represented in traditionalist Catholicism, who did not recognize his intellectual and literary value.

In 1918, he joined in a protest with Miguel de Unamuno and Mariano de Cavia against the encroaching censorship and authoritarianism coming from the putatively constitutional monarch.