Lazarillo de Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes is a short Spanish novel published anonymously in 1554, appearing simultaneously in editions in Alcala de Henares, Burgos, Medina del Campo and Antwerp; its authorship remains unknown, in part because its sharp anticlerical content made anonymous publication prudent. Narrated by its title character, a boy of humble origin from Salamanca, the novel follows Lazaro through service to a succession of masters, among them a blind beggar, a miserly priest, an impoverished nobleman and a friar, whose cruelty and hypocrisy teach him the cunning and moral flexibility he needs simply to eat and survive. Widely credited as the founding work of the picaresque novel, it broke with the idealized romances of its time to depict poverty, hunger and social injustice with unusual directness, and was placed on the Spanish Inquisition's Index of Forbidden Books for its treatment of the clergy, with an unabridged text not permitted in Spain again until the nineteenth century. Its influence has been traced in Cervantes, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, among many later works built on a low-born narrator's episodic passage through a corrupt society.