PÉREZ GALDÓS, BENITO. — Writer, born in Las Palmas (Canary Islands) on 10 May 1843, died in Madrid on 4 January 1920. He lived almost always in Madrid, whose life and customs he described. Although a deputy in 1885 and 1906, he took a greater interest in political life than he actively participated in II. In 1897 he became a member of the Real Academia de la Lengua.
He spent his final years afflicted by the hostility of his adversaries and by blindness. His literary output (117 works) is usually grouped into historical novels (the four series of Episodios nacionales, which narrate the history of 19th-century Spain); realistic novels (among which Doña Perfecta; Gloria, Marianela; La familia de León Roch; Fortunata y Jacinta; Angel Guerra; Misericordia); theatrical works (notable among which are Realidad; La Loca de la Casa; El Abuelo); political articles, literary pieces, and memoirs. Though at times somewhat careless and hasty in his exposition, P. G. is among the greatest Spanish storytellers of the 19th century. In him, traditional realism is joined to a wealth of imagination and a reflection of contemporary literary demands. His countless characters throb with intense emotional life, in which the painful distrust of the world and its institutions blends with an understanding of human misery, which appeared to him as something tragically irreparable. Despite such a pessimistic view of life, P. G. discovers in it a primitive human goodness, sometimes unconscious, sometimes deliberately concealed. He was opposed to every form of fanaticism and religious intolerance, but he did not understand practicing and militant Catholicism and, indeed, adopted a decidedly anticlerical stance (cf. Doña Perfecta; La familia de León Roch). This attitude, however, does not exclude an aspiration toward a simple and sincere religiosity that would not be limited to the externality of a purely formal cult.