SOURCE: DeCoster, Cyrus C. Introduction to “The Nail” and Other Stories, by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, translated by Robert M. Fedorchek, pp. 17-24. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, DeCoster offers an overview of Alarcón's life and fiction.

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was born in 1833 in Guadix, then an impoverished city of ten thousand inhabitants in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada forty miles east of Granada. He studied law for a few months at the University of Granada, but his parents could ill afford the cost. He then enrolled in the seminary in Guadix but found that he had little calling for the clergy. Writing was what really attracted him, and he began a historical drama, La conquista de Guadix (The Conquest of Guadix), which has been lost, and an early version of the novel El final de Norma (Norma's End...