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Biography of Pío Baroja y NessiName: Pío Baroja y NessiBirth Date: December 28, 1872 Death Date: October 30, 1956 Place of Birth: San Sebastián, Spain Nationality: Spanish Gender: Male Occupations: novelist, essayist Pío Baroja y Nessi The Spanish novelist and essayist Pío Baroja y Nessi (1872-1956) ranks as one of the major writers of Spain's Generation of 1898. His many works consistently reveal harsh criticism of his country and a pessimistic view of life.Pío Baroja was born on Dec. 28, 1872, in San Sebastián. In 1879 the family moved to Madrid, where at 15 he began to study medicine. He received his doctorate in medicine at the University of Madrid in 1893 and spent the next year as a country doctor in Cestona, a small Basque town. Disgusted by the hardships and petty intrigues of country life, Baroja renounced his medical post in 1895 and the following year joined his brother Ricardo in managing a bakery in Madrid. The shock of the Spanish-American War in 1898 provoked in him, as in many of his contemporaries, a poraries, a protest against Spain's social abuses and the corrosive influence of …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…of structure to an almost haphazard flow of people, places, plots, and subplots, and the use of a style marked by short, choppy paragraphs.Baroja enjoyed considerable fame within Spain and abroad, and many of his novels were translated into English. In 1935 he was admitted to the Spanish Royal Academy. His works influenced many younger writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, who visited Baroja in Madrid in 1956 to declare his debt to him. Baroja died on Oct. 30, 1956, at the age of 83. Further Reading The most comprehensive account of Baroja's life and work is in Spanish, Fernando Baeza, ed., Baroja y su mundo (2 vols., 1961). The best analysis of his novelistic technique is the chapter "Pío Baroja" in Katherine P. Reding, The Generation of 1898 as Seen through Its Fictional Hero (1936). Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People: From Roman Times to the Present Day (1951; rev. ed. 1953), contains useful information about Baroja. |