Ricardo Palma
1833–1919
Biography
Ricardo Palma (1833–1919) was a Peruvian writer, librarian and public man, long regarded as a native of Lima. As a young man he wrote verse, romantic plays and political satire for newspapers and magazines. He took the liberal side in the politics of his time, was linked to a failed plot against President Ramón Castilla in 1860, and spent a period in exile in Chile before returning home. Later he travelled to Europe and held a consular post in Brazil, and he went on to take up public office in Lima.
His best-known work is a series of brief prose pieces he called tradiciones. They mix history with invention and were written both to amuse and to teach. Palma took events from the colonial and republican past of Peru and told them with wit, drawing on legend, hearsay and archive research. The volumes appeared between 1872 and 1910. He never presented them as strict history, and they are best read as historical fiction. Earlier he had won a reputation as a scholar, with a study of the Inquisition in Lima published in 1863, and he campaigned for the Spanish Royal Academy to recognise the vocabulary of Spanish America.
The War of the Pacific (1879–1883) cost Palma his own library, and the National Library in Lima had been ransacked by Chilean occupying troops in 1881. Afterwards he was made its director and spent years rebuilding the collection, recovering thousands of books that had been carried off, partly through his friendships and personal efforts. He kept the post until his retirement in 1912. The Tradiciones peruanas on this site is the book that keeps his name alive, and it offers an entertaining way into Peruvian history from the viceroyalty to the republic.
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Books
Tradiciones peruanas
by Ricardo Palma
Ricardo Palma's short, witty pieces of Peruvian history, legend and anecdote, most of them from colonial Lima. Each one mixes chronicle and gossip, told with irony and a storyteller's freedom.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.