Antonio de Trueba (24 December 181910 March 1889) was a Spanish
poet,
novelist, and
folklorist
Folklore studies, less often known as folkloristics, and occasionally tradition studies or folk life studies in the United Kingdom, is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currenc ...
.
Life
He was born in
Galdames
Galdames () is a valley, town and municipality located in the province of Biscay, in the autonomous community of Basque Country, northern Spain.
Main sights are Santa Maria Magdalena and Arenaza caves, both situated in Triano mountain range an ...
(at the quarter of Montellano),
Biscay, in 1821 (some sources say 1819), where he was privately educated.
In 1835 he went to
Madrid to learn business; but
commerce was not to his taste, and, after a long apprenticeship, he turned to journalism, hoping to make a livelihood by literary pursuits. To earn his daily bread he discharged the duties of a clerk in a small commercial house, but all the while he beguiled his leisure and his moments of regret by writing little poems and tales redolent of the yearnings and sympathies of a
Basque transplanted to the busy cosmopolitan center.
Won over to him by the charm of his writings,
Queen Isabella II made him
historiographer of the Biscayan district, and he held this post until her flight in 1868. He was reinstated after the restoration.
In 1851 he hit the popular taste with ''El Cid Campeador'' and ''El Libro de los Cantares''. His popularity was fixed by the appearance of his first collection of
lyrics, the ''Cantares'' (Madrid, 1852), and for the next eleven years he was absorbed by journalistic work, the best of his contributions being issued under the titles of ''Cuentos populares'' (1862), ''Cuentos de color de rosa'' (1864), and ''Cuentos campesinos'' (1865).
Other collections of his tales, especially charming when they deal with his native region and its people, appeared in 1859, 1860, and 1866. The pleasant simplicity and idyllic sentimentalism of these collections delighted an uncritical public, and de Trueba met the demand by supplying a series of stories conceived in the same ingenious vein.
In his more ambitious attempts at writing a novel, as in his work dealing with
El Cid
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043 – 10 July 1099) was a Castilian knight and warlord in medieval Spain. Fighting with both Christian and Muslim armies during his lifetime, he earned the Arabic honorific ''al-sīd'', which would evolve into El ...
of history and legend, he failed signally; he was too conscientiously a recorder of the past and left his imagination no free play. He remains an amiable writer of second rank, but no one can read without sympathy and appreciation his pretty little songs fragrant with love for the landscape of his northern
Spanish home. He deserves serious notice among the earlier writers who helped to develop the
novel of manners
A novel of manners is a work of fiction that re-creates a social world, conveying with detailed observation the customs, values, and mores of a highly developed and complex society. The conventions of the society dominate the action of the story, ...
in the Spain of the 19th century.
He died at
Bilbao.
Notes
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Trueba, Antonio de
Spanish male writers
1819 births
1889 deaths
Spanish folklorists
Spanish novelists
Spanish poets