Leopoldo Arias, known by his pseudonym Clarín, and widely known as the author of La Regenta, was born in Zamora on April 25th, 1852. He spent part of his childhood in León and Guadalajara, where his father was civil governor.
In 1865, he moved to Asturias, a land with which he formed a special bond, where he lived most of his life—except for certain periods—and where he died.
One of those periods was the one that kept him in Madrid from 1871 to 1878, where he furthered his law studies, a degree he had earned in Oviedo, participated in the cultural and political ferment of the time, and began publishing journalistic contributions. He had already dabbled in writing long before that: at the age of seven, he won his first literary prize, and as a teenager, he and some friends founded the newspaper La Instruccion (of which no copies survive), in which he signed himself as Juan Ruiz.
