Benito Pérez Galdós

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Portrait of Benito Pérez Galdós by J. Sorolla (1894)

Republican homage, bust by Erminio Blotta, at Independencia Park, Rosario, Argentina

Benito Pérez Galdós (May 10, 1843 – January 4, 1920) was a Spanish realist novelist. Considered by many second only to Cervantes in stature, Pérez Galdós was the greatest Spanish realist novelist. Born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, he moved to Madrid at the age of 20 where he spent most of his adult life. Within Spain his most popular works are the earlier works: the Episodios nacionales (46 volumes). Outside Spain his Novelas españolas contemporáneas are more popular.

Pérez Galdós' early novels mix historical and fictional characters and are the result of documentary research. As in Balzac, some characters appear in different novels. They cover the period from 1805 to the end of the 19th century and provide glimpses of Pérez Galdós' liberal and anti-clerical views, which become more developed in the contemporary novels. In Doña Perfecta (1876) a young liberal comes to a stiflingly clerical town. In Marianela (1878) a young man regains his sight after a life of being blind and rejects his best friend Marianela for her uglyness. In Miau (1888) a pretentious family lose their livelihood when the father, an elderly civil servant, loses his job through a change in government, and eventually commits suicide. Pérez Galdós' masterpiece is Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–1887). It is almost as long as War and Peace and concerns the fortunes of four characters: a young man about town, his wife, his lower-class mistress and her husband. Ángel Guerra (1891) is the story of an unbalanced man who attempts to win a devout and inaccessible woman, swinging from agnosticism to Catholicism in the process. Pérez Galdós is more realistic than Balzac or Tolstoy, and like Dickens, depicts middle-class snobbishness and fear of poverty.

In 1886 then prime minister Praxedes Mateo Sagasta appointed him as the (absent) deputy for the town and district of Guayama, Puerto Rico at the Madrid parliament; he never visited the place, but had a representative inform him of the status of the area, and felt a duty to represent its inhabitants appropriately. In 1897, Pérez Galdós was elected to the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy). In 1907 he became a deputy for the Republican Party in the parliament. He went blind in 1912 but continued to dictate his books for the rest of his life. Pérez Galdós died at the age of 76. Shortly before his death, a statue in his honour was constructed in the Parque del Retiro, the most popular park in Madrid, financed solely by public donations.

Pérez Galdós was, and still is, massively popular in Spain, where he is considered the Spanish equivalent of Tolstoy. However, his chance of international fame was sabotaged by his own jealous countrymen when they launched a slander campaign against him after learning that he would be nominated for the Nobel Prize^{[citation needed]}. As recently as 1950 few of his works were available in English translation (although he has been slowly growing in popularity in the English-speaking world ever since).

His plays are generally considered to be less successful than his novels, though Realidad (1892) is important in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre.

Many film adaptations have been made of his novels: Beauty in Chains (Doña Perfecta) was directed by Elsie Jane Wilson in 1918. Luis Buñuel failed to credit the fact that Viridiana (1961) was based on Halma. Buñuel also adapted Nazarín in 1959, and his Tristana (1970) was similarly based on Pérez Galdós. El Abuelo (The Grandfather), filmed by José Luis Garci in 1998, was released internationally a year later; it had previously been adapted into an Argentine film, El Abuelo, in 1954.