biography
| name: |
Picón, Jacinto Octavio
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pronunciation:
[peekon]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1852–1923)
|
| biography:
| Novelist and short-story writer, born in Madrid, Spain. He studied in France and at Madrid University. He excelled as a short-story writer, in Cuentos de mi tiempo (1895), Mujeres (1911), and similar books. As a novelist he followed Valera closely, suggesting that his books were intended for entertainment rather than instruction, and paying more heed to his own status as an ironic and detached observer than to the passions and inner lives of his characters. His books were all set in Madrid. Some earlier novels were anti-clerical in tone, among them Lázaro (1882, subtitled casi novela) and El enemigo (1887). Another group emphasizes the rightness of spontaneous love against forced love, even against artificial ties of marriages where love does not exist, as in La hijastra del amor (1884), La honrada (1890), Dulce y Sabrosa (1891), Sacramento (1910), and Juanita Tenorio (1914), the last with a twist all too predictable from its title (Tenorio being the surname of ‘Don Juan’). Juan Vulgar (1885) is the ironic study of a student from Andalusia in Madrid. He also wrote some of the most durable art criticism of his time, as in Vida y obras de don Diego Velázquez (1899) and El desnudo en el arte (1902). |
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