Word: picaro
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they did in the Spanish Civil War. Unamuno liked to compare himself to Don Quixote in his contradictions and paradoxes, and his critics have accepted the analogy. "He was refined and savage," said one, "modern and medieval, with the unction of an apostle and the wisdom of a picaro, a man in whom all the defects and virtues of the Spanish race seem to culminate...
Spain and then rapidly reprinted all over the Continent. Readers rich and poor were troubled by the author's smiling horror of Renaissance society, but they were also tickled by the scarum scrapes and earthy humor of his hero, a perky little picaro (scalawag) who became the Huck Finn of his century. Aleman, Cervantes, Lesage, Defoe and Fielding were inspired to imitation, and today Lazarillo is acclaimed as the prototype of the picaresque novel, as a handsel of the arriving era of realism in European literature...
...great raconteur, Manuel reveals himself as an intelligent picaro, with a tragic marriage which ended when his wife died and his mistress married someone else, leaving him with children whom he refuses to care for. Before this trauma, he had lived through a mixed childhood, marrying at 15, but still fatally attracted to his first love. After it, he attempts to start over as a laborer in California, only to return to Mexico City and a life of shady dealings on the open market, gambling, and drink...