Biography
Quevedo was born in Madrid into a family of hidalgos from the village of Vejorís, located in the northern mountainous region of Cantabria. His family was descended from the Castilian nobility.
Quevedo's father, Francisco Gómez de Quevedo, was secretary to Maria of Spain, daughter of emperor Charles V and wife of Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, and his mother, Madrid-born María de Santibáñez, was lady-in-waiting to the queen. Quevedo matured surrounded by dignitaries and nobility at the royal court. Intellectually gifted, Quevedo was physically handicapped with a club foot, and myopia. Since he always wore pince-nez, his name in the plural, quevedos, came to mean "pince-nez" in the Spanish language.
Orphaned by the age of six, he was able to attend the Imperial School run by the Jesuits in Madrid. He then attended university at Alcalá de Henares from 1596 to 1600. By his own account, he made independent studies in philosophy, classical languages, Arabic, Hebrew, French and Italian.
In 1601, Quevedo, as a member of the Court, moved to Valladolid, where the Court had been transferred by the King's minister, the Duke of Lerma. There he studied theology, a subject that would become a lifelong interest, and on which in later life he would compose the treatise Providencia de Dios (God's Providence), against atheism.
By this time, he was becoming noted as both a poet and a prose writer. Some of his poetry was collected in a 1605 generational anthology by Pedro Espinosa entitled Flores de Poetas Ilustres (Flowers by Illustrious Poets).
We can also date back to this time the first draft of his picaresque novel Vida del Buscón -apparently written as an exercise in courtly wit- and a few satirical pamphlets that made him famous among his fellow students and which he would later disown as juvenile pranks.
Around this time, he began a very erudite exchange of letters with the humanist Justus Lipsius, in which Quevedo deplored the wars that were ravaging Europe. The Court returned to Madrid in 1606, and Quevedo followed, remaining till 1611. By then, he was a well-known and accomplished man-of-letters. He befriended and was praised by Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega, the premier playwright of the age.
Read more about this topic: Francisco De Quevedo
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