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Baltasar Gracián y Morales (January 8, 1601 -
December 6, 1658), Spain|Spanish prose writer, was
born at Calatayud (Aragon).

==Biography==
The son of a doctor, in his childhood Gracián
lived with his uncle, who was a priest. He studied
at a Jesuit school in Zaragoza from 1616 to 1619
and at the age of 18 became a novice.  He studied
philosophy at the College of Calatayud in 1621 and
1623 and theology in Zaragoza.  He was ordained in
1627 and took his final vows in 1635. 

He assumed the vows of the Jesuits in 1633 and
dedicated himself to teaching in various Jesuit
schools. He spent time in Huesca, where he
befriended the local scholar Vincencio Juán de
Lastanosa, who helped him achieve an important
milestone in his intellectual upbringing. He
acquired fame as a preacher, although some of his
oratorical displays, such as reading a letter sent
from Hell from the pulpit, were frowned upon by
his superiors. He was named President of the
college of the Tarragona Company and wrote works
proposing models for courtly conduct such as El
héroe (The Hero), El político (The Politician),
and El discreto (The Discreet One). During the
Spanish war with Catalonia and France, he was
chaplain of the army that liberated Lleida in
1646. 

In 1651, he published the first part of the
Criticón (Faultfinder) without the permission of
his superiors, whom he disobeyed repeatedly. This
attracted the Company's displeasure. Ignoring the
reprimands, he published the third part of
Criticón in 1657, and as a result was sanctioned
and exiled to Graus. He tried to leave the order
but was unsuccessful. He died in 1658. 

Gracián is the most representative writer of the
Spanish Baroque literary style known as
Conceptismo (Conceptism), of which he was the most
important theoretician; his Agudeza y arte de
ingenio (Wit and the Art of Inventiveness) is at
once a poetics|poetic, a rhetoric and an anthology
of the conceptist style.

==The Criticón==
The three parts of the Criticón, published in
1651, 1653, and 1657, achieved fame in Europe,
especially in the German-speaking countries. It
is, without a doubt, the author's masterpiece and
one of the great works of the Siglo de Oro. It is
a lengthy allegorical novel with philosophical
overtones. It recalls the Byzantine
novel|Byzantine style of novel in its many
vicissitudes and in the numerous adventures
through which the characters are subjected, as
well as the picaresque novel in its satirical take
on society, as evidenced in the long pilgrimage
undertaken by the main characters, Critilo, the
"critical man" who personifies disillusionment,
and Andrenio, the "natural man" who represents
innocence and primitive impulses. The author
constantly exhibits a perspectivist technique that
unfolds according to the criteria or points of
view of both characters, but in an antithetical
rather than plural way as in Miguel de Cervantes.
The novel reveals a philosophy, pessimism, with
which one of his best readers and admirers, the
19th century German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer, identified. 

The following is a summary of the Criticón,
reduced almost to the point of a sketch, of a
complex work that demands detailed study. 

Critilo, man of the world, is shipwrecked on the
coast of the island of Santa Elena, where he meets
Andrenio, the natural man, who has grown up
completely ignorant  of civilization. Together
they undertake a long voyage to the Isle of
Immortality, travelling the long and prickly road
of life. In the first part, "En la primavera de la
niñez" ("In the Spring of Youth"), they join the
royal court, where they suffer all manner of
disappointments; in the second part, "En el otoño
de la varonil edad" ("In the Autumn of the Age of
Manliness"), they pass through Aragon, where they
visit the house of Salastano (an anagram of the
name of Gracián's friend Lastanosa), and travel
to France, which the author calls the "wasteland
of Hipocrinda", populated entirely by hypocrites
and dunces, ending with a visit to a house of
lunatics. In the third part, "En el invierno de la
vejez" ("In the Winter of Old Age"), they arrive
in Rome, where the encounter an academy where they
meet the most inventive of men, arriving finally
at the Isle of Immortality. 

Gracián's style, generically called conceptism,
is characterized by ellipsis#Other
meanings|ellipsis and the concentration of a
maximum of significance in a minimum of form, an
approach referred to in Spanish as agudeza, (wit),
and which is brought to its extreme in the
Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Oracle, a
Manual of the Art of Discretion), composed
entirely of almost three hundred maxims with
commentary. He constantly plays with words: each
phrase becomes a puzzle, using the most diverse
rhetorical devices.

==Admirers==
He has been excessively praised by Schopenhauer,
whose appreciation of the author induced him to
translate the Oráculo manual, and he has been
unduly depreciated by George Ticknor|Ticknor and
others. He is an acute thinker and observer,
misled by his systematic misanthropy and by his
fantastic literary theories.

==Works==
* El héroe (1637, The Hero), a criticism of
Niccolò Machiavelli|Machiavelli drawing a
portrait of the ideal Christian leader. 
* El político Don Fernando el Católico (1640,
The Politician King Ferdinand the Catholic),
presents his ideal image of the politician.
* Arte de ingenio (1642, revised as Agudeza y arte
de ingenio in 1648 (translated as The Mind's Wit
and Art by Leonard H. Chambers), an essay on
literature and aesthetics.
* El discreto (1646, The Complete Gentleman),
described the qualities which make the
sophisticated man of the world. 
* Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647),
translated as The Art of Worldly Wisdom (by Joseph
Jacobs, 1892), The Oracle, a Manual of the Art of
Discretion (by L.B. Walton), Practical Wisdom for
Perilous Times (in selections by J. Leonard Kaye),
or The Science of Success and the Art of Prudence,
his most famous book, some 300 aphorisms with
comments.
* El Criticón (1651-1657), a novel, translated as
The Critic by Sir Paul Rycaut in 1681.

The only publication which bears Gracián's name
is El Comulgatorio (1655); his more important
books were issued under the pseudonym of Lorenzo
Gracin (possibly a brother of the writer) or under
the anagram of Gracian de Marlones Gracián was
punished for publishing without his superior's
permission El Criticón (in which Daniel
Defoe|Defoe is alleged to have found the germ of
Robinson Crusoe): but no objection was taken to
its substance.

See Karl Borinski, Baltasar Gracián und die
Hoflitteratur in Deutschlaed (Halle, 1894);
Benedetto Croce, I Trattatisti Italians del
conceltismo e Baltasar Gracián (Napoli, 1899);
Narciso José Lin y Heredia, Baltasar Gracián
(Madrid, 1902). Schopenhauer and Joseph Jacobs
have respectively translated the Oráculo manual
into German and English.

==References==
*Gracián and Perfection by Monroe Z. Hafter
(1966)
*Baltasar Gracián by Virginia R. Foster (1975)
*The Truth Disguised by Theodore L. Kassier (1976)

==External links==

*http://www.bartleby.com/65/gr/Gracian.html
Gracián, Baltasar in The Columbia Encyclopedia,
Sixth Edition, 2001.
*http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gracian.htm Baltasar
Gracián biography and bibliography, from Books
and Writers.
*http://usuarios.lycos.es/albo/baltasar-i/psicoana
lisis.htm "Gracián and the psychoanalysis",
features a portrait.
*http://www.ctv.es/USERS/adelgado/gracian.htm
Balthasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom
*http://des.emory.edu/mfp/Gracian/ Translation of
El Arte de Prudencia