He wrote 77 novels and still couldn't pay his bills. Benito Perez Galdos spent decades chronicling every layer of Spanish society in prose so vivid that Madrid felt like a character itself. His Episodios Nacionales alone ran to 46 volumes covering a century of Spanish history, from the Battle of Trafalgar through the Carlist Wars to the Bourbon Restoration. Shopkeepers, aristocrats, priests, beggars, revolutionaries, con artists: Galdos gave them all interior lives with a psychological depth that drew comparisons to Balzac and Dickens. Born in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria in 1843, he moved to Madrid at nineteen to study law and never practiced. He walked the streets of the capital compulsively, absorbing the speech patterns and daily rhythms of every neighborhood. His novels Fortunata and Jacinta and Dona Perfecta became essential Spanish literature, read in every school. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912 but never won, partly because Spain's conservative Catholic establishment lobbied against him. His liberal politics and anticlerical novels, which depicted the Church as an obstacle to Spanish modernization, made powerful enemies in Madrid and at the Vatican. He ran for parliament twice as a Republican and used his platform to attack the Church's grip on education and public life. He spent faster than he earned, gave money away to anyone who asked, and kept a household that functioned as an open salon. His final years were spent nearly blind and broke, dictating his last novels to a secretary while creditors circled. He died on January 4, 1920. Thirty thousand people walked behind his coffin through the streets of Madrid. They knew what they'd lost: the novelist who had given their country its most honest mirror.