Biography of Baltasar Jerónimo Gracián y Morales

Name: Baltasar Jerónimo Gracián y Morales
Birth Date: 1601
Death Date: December 6, 1658
Place of Birth: Calatayud, Aragon, Spain
Nationality: Spanish
Gender: Male
Occupations: humorist, satirist, novelist, author

Baltasar Jerónimo Gracián y Morales

Baltasar Jerónimo Gracián y Morales (1601-1658), Spanish humorist, satirist, baroque stylist, and philosophical novelist, is classed with the greatest prose masters of Spain's Golden Age.Born into a religious family in Calatayud, Aragon, son of a doctor, Baltasar Gracián was sent at 12 to study in the medieval atmosphere of Toledo. At 18 he entered the Society of Jesus and was sent to Saragossa and later to Valencia to study theology. Soon after his ordination as a Jesuit in 1635, he met Juan de Lastanosa, who provided Gracián and several of his creative contemporaries a home and financial support affording unlimited leisure for peripatetic conversation and meditation, as well as a means to publication.After holding several pastorates, Gracián served as field chaplain to the Spanish army under Gen. Pablo Parada. Later, while professor of religion at Saragossa, he published without the permission of …showed first 150 words…

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…showed last 150 words…collect and anthologize his innermost thoughts, Gracián thoroughly combed his own works published before 1647 to compile Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom). This book is one of the great modern collections of maxims. Further Reading The lengthiest recent study in English of Gracián is L. B. Walton's introduction to his translation of Gracian's The Oracle: A Manual of the Art of Discretion (1953). An older study in English is the introduction of Joseph Jacobs in his translation of the same work, entitled The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1892; repr. 1943). Recommended for detailed analyses in English of Gracián's works is Aubrey F. G. Bell, Baltasar Gracián (1921). A more recent work is Monroe Z. Hafter, Gracián and Perfection: Spanish Moralists of the Seventeenth Century (1966). General historical background is in John Crow, Spain: The Root and the Flower (1963).

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