Spanish · 1852–1901
Leopoldo Alas signed his newspaper criticism Clarín, the bugle, and used it to terrify Spanish literary Madrid for twenty years; his short review columns, called paliques, could end a reputation in a paragraph. He taught law at Oviedo, the provincial cathedral city he renamed Vetusta and dissected in La Regenta, a novel so plainly modelled on Flaubert and so hostile to the local clergy that the bishop of Oviedo denounced it from the pulpit. Alas was a republican, a reader of Zola and Renan, and a Catholic of the anxious kind who could not let religion alone. He wrote one further novel, a handful of the best short stories in Spanish, and then died at forty-eight of intestinal tuberculosis. La Regenta went largely unread for fifty years, suppressed by respectability and then by Franco's censors, and is now taught as the greatest Spanish novel after Don Quixote.