José Echegaray was born on this date in 1833 in Madrid, Spain, and died in 1916. The dramatist is one of only a dozen Latinos to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he won in 1904.
Echegaray was a mathematician who was working for the government when he decided to pursue a career in his first love – theater. His plays, known for their romanticism, were wildly popular in his country. His most famous play is 1881’s El gran Galeoto (The Great Galeotto) about the effects of gossip on one man.
The Hispanic Reader 