It is likely that it will never be known who wrote this work. For a long time it was suggested that the author was a nobleman, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza; recently, it has been suggested that it was Alfonso de Valdés, a highly educated imperial official with Erasmian tendencies. No one would think that this story was written by the participant himself. The tale concerns the life of the son of a woman who ended up living with a black slave—the child becomes a blind man’s guide, the servant of several masters, and, finally, Toledo’s town crier as a result of the influence of an archpriest who was certainly his mother’s lover. Yet this short book would have us believe that, in all honesty, it is a letter in which Lázaro explains the “situation” that has aroused so much attention in the anonymous man or woman (“Your worship”) to whom the text is addressed. Everything the author wrote was already the material of folklore or from the repertory of anticlerical tales; but what was radically new was the uninhibited tone and the skill with which he turned the whole collection into the experiences of just one life. This work was the start of the picaresque story, but it was also much more: the modern novel as a personal expression of the world. JCM