The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

What It's About

Lázaro, born to poverty on the banks of the river Tormes, is handed over as a boy to serve a series of masters, each more miserly or hypocritical than the last. A cunning blind beggar teaches him to survive by his wits; a stingy priest nearly starves him; a penniless nobleman clings to appearances while begging in secret. Told in Lázaro's own voice as a kind of confessional letter, the novella follows his education in hunger, deception, and the gap between how people appear and how they actually live.

Key Concepts

Lazarillo de Tormes is credited with founding the picaresque genre: a first-person narrative told by a low-born "rogue" (pícaro) who survives by cunning rather than virtue. Its recurring targets are religious hypocrisy and the obsession with social status among Spain's impoverished nobility, and hunger runs through the book as both a literal condition and a metaphor for the boy's moral education. Its frank anticlericalism led to the book being placed on the Spanish Inquisition's Index of banned books shortly after publication.

About the Author

The identity of the author has never been confirmed. The novella was published anonymously in 1554, almost certainly because of its satirical treatment of the clergy, and no signed manuscript or contemporary attribution survives. Various candidates have been proposed by later scholars, but none is universally accepted, and the book is generally catalogued as the work of an unknown author.

About This Edition

This is a 1908 translation by Clements Markham.