Oller i de Moragas, Narcís (Valls 1846 – Barcelona 1930). Novelist, playwright and translator. He started work in Spanish on a Romantic novel, El pintor Rubio, which he did not complete because the Floral Games in Barcelona in 1877 and his friends from the group La Renaixença had such an effect on him that he decided to write in Catalan. His first book of short stories, Croquis del natural (1879), was the first sign that he was drifting towards Realism, and this tendency was confirmed in his first novel, La Papallona (1882), although it also contained some Romantic features. His friendship with the two great literary critics of the age, Josep Yxart and Joan Sardà, was fundamental in his adopting a realist style with some features of Naturalism – which prompted Émile Zola to write in the prologue to the French translation of La Papallona (1885) that the work did not belong to his school.

Oller continued to evolve as a storyteller and novelist with Vilaniu (1886), a portrait of society in a medium-sized Catalan town, and La febre d’or (1890-92), which dealt with the excitement aroused by the stock market and its subsequent crash at the beginning of the 1880s. During this period, he also published the short novel L’escanyapobres (1884), which dealt with an extreme case of avarice, and the collections of short stories Notes de color (1883) and De tots colors (1888). Various works of his were translated into other languages, and he became friends with novelists from Spain (José María de Pereda, Benito Pérez Galdós, Juan Valera) and elsewhere.

In the middle of the 1890s, he experienced a serious creative crisis because he started to have doubts about Realism and both his literary friends and mentors, Yxart and Sardà, died. In his search for new approaches he wrote some of his best work: the collection Figura i paisatge (1897) and two novels: the highly original La bogeria (1899), which focuses on determinism, and Pilar Prim (1906), his masterpiece. The emergence of Noucentisme marginalized him and definitively discouraged him from writing any further novels. He was only to publish two collections of short stories, which drew together a wide variety of material, Rurals i urbanes (1914) and Al llapis i a la ploma (1918). He spent his time and energy translating – Tolstoj and Turgenev, among others – writing plays and composing his Memòries literàries, which were to be published posthumously. Reinstated in the last years of his life, when the Noucentisme cultural movement ended, by the publication of his Obres completes (1928-30), he is today considered to be a modern classic and has a considerable number of readers.