Jacinto Benavente

Jacinto Benavente y Martínez (12 August 1866 – 14 July 1954) was one of the foremost Spanish dramatists of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama". Born in Madrid, the son of a celebrated pediatrician, he returned drama to reality by way of social criticism: declamatory verse giving way to prose, melodrama to comedy, formula to experience, impulsive action to dialogue and the play of minds. Benavente showed a preoccupation with aesthetics and later with ethics.

A liberal monarchist and a critic of socialism, he was a reluctant supporter of Francoist Spain as the only viable alternative to what he considered the disastrous republican experiment of 1931–1936. In 1936 Benavente's name became associated with the assassination of the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. This happened when the Nationalist newspapers Estampa, El Correo de Andalucia, and Ideal circulated a fake news story that Lorca had been killed as a reprisal for the Republican murder of Benavente. Benavente died in Aldeaencabo de Escalona (Toledo) at the age of 87. He never married. According to many sources, he was homosexual.