Benito Pérez Galdós

Galdós arrived in Madrid from the Canary Islands ostensibly to study law and instead absorbed the city (its journalism, its art, its street life), which became the raw material for his fiction. Alongside his contemporary novels he wrote the Episodios Nacionales, a sprawling forty-six-volume cycle dramatizing nineteenth-century Spanish history decade by decade, an undertaking without real parallel elsewhere in European fiction.

Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) is the peak of his social-realist ambition, mapping all of Madrid across a single love triangle. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize repeatedly and never won it, reportedly blocked by conservative and clerical opposition within Spain itself; he went blind in his final years and kept working by dictation.

He died in poverty in 1920; Madrid gave him a huge public funeral all the same.