Jose M De Pereda(1833-1906) Spanish realistic writer and customs man born in Polanco (Cantabria) on February 6, 1833. Since he was a child he showed signs of nervous disorders that got worse over the years and whose symptoms he describes in his novel "Summer Clouds" Belonging to a traditionalist and Catholic family, he is influenced by his parents, preferably his mother, and his older brother Juan Agapito is protected in his youth. After finishing high school in Santander, he entered the Artillery School of Madrid, but abandoned it for literature. While in Madrid, he witnessed the revolution of 1854 in which he almost lost his life due to the shooting in the streets, events that he recounted in detail in his novel "Pedro Sánchez". During his stay he wrote a play, Fortune in a hat (1854), a comedy that was unpublished, where the theme of idyll, marriage of convenience and the case of the young woman sacrificed by marriage appears to save the family economy. In 1862 he signed the book Ecos de la Montaña by the poet Calixto Fernández Camporredondo, signing "Paredes", which indicates that he already had prestige in Santander as a man of letters. The following year, with the same pseudonym, he collaborated in the Illustrated Almanac of the Mountain Bee, in which he published the article "Jupiter. His life and miracles "and" The archer ". Some of the costumbristas pictures published in the section of La Abeja's folletin, later went to his books. Within this period of journalism, his attempts in the theater field coincide with comic-lyrical works of a customist nature: "So much, so much worth" (1861); "Sticks in the dry" (1861), "March with the century" (1863), "World, love and vanity" (1863). The low value of these early works made them known only (except for some that came to be released) with the title of dramatic essays in a restricted edition, in 1869, destined for his friends. By then Pereda had achieved literary prestige as a result of the publication in 1864 of his first book, "Mountain scenes". Proof of the prestige that his first work gave him is that, without ceasing to write in the Santander press, he began publishing in 1864 in the prestigious Madrid newspaper El Museo Universal and in 1866 he collaborated with other authors on the book Scenes of Life, collection of tales and customs tables, published in Madrid by a society of authors, including Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Antonio Trueba, Eduardo Bustillo, Ventura Ruiz ... From this moment and in less than five years José María de Pereda is consolidated as a writer and his name begins to sound among the authors in vogue to the point of receiving public praise as a traditional writer. In his second book, Types and Landscapes, the author placed special interest especially in the story entitled "Blazons and bags." His political participation in Madrid helped him to make himself known, and to give him an experience in electoral mechanics, which he later poured into his short novel Los hombres de pro, included in his book Bocetos al temple (1876). When his political activities in Madrid cease, he stops writing. He himself tells it like this: I returned to my house and more in love with the peace of my home than with politics and that with literature I had to dedicate myself entirely to sharing with my wife the care of the children I had at the time. Four or five years passed then without me publishing or writing anything. As a writer, both personally and literarily, he offered his contemporaries a singular and very differentiating image, and according to Menéndez Pelayo "what was distinctive about his mental structure was incommunicable, and he himself could not have defined it." Benito Pérez Galdós highlighted "his vigorous personality" and the uniqueness of his literary work that made him different from the writers of his time. Read More Read Less