Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870)
Bewildering Stories biography
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was born in Seville and died of consumption in Madrid, a town that he came to in 1853 at the age of seventeen with the idea of making his name there as a poet. His brother Valeriano was a painter, as was their father. Gustavo studied in the same studio for a time until he decided that his real aspirations lay in being a writer.
In Madrid, in what for him was later life by then, he eked out a living with journalism, submitting short stories and articles to newspapers and periodicals. He discovered Toledo for the first time in 1854 when he was living there with his brother. He started to write his Historia de los templos de España (“A History of Spanish Temples”) eventually published in 1859.
He was influenced not only by his Spanish Romantic contemporaries, Espronceda and Zorrilla, but also by reading in Spanish translation the tales of Hoffmann and those of Edgar Allan Poe. His story “El beso” (“The Kiss”) is set against the background of the occupation by French soldiers under Bonaparte in the Spanish city of Toledo during the first decade of the 19th century.
Copyright © 2023 by Michael Wooff
