Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del

Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del

 orig. Ramón Valle y Villanueva de Arosa

(born Oct. 28, 1866, Villanueva de Arosa, Spain—died Jan. 5, 1936, Santiago de Compostela) Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet. Early on he was influenced by the Symbolist movement, and his first four works, collectively called the Sonatas (1902–05), are evocatively written in a tone of refined and elegant decadence. Some later plays and novels take an intentionally absurdist and cruelly satiric tone to express what he saw as the Spanish deformation of European civilization; representative are the play Bohemian Lights (1921) and the novel The Court of Miracles (1927).