Pedro Abraham Valdelomar was born in lca on April 16, 1888 . Son of Amfiloquio Valdelomar and Carolina Pinto, he lived his childhood in the port of Pisco, which would influence his stories and his poems so much.
At the age of five he traveled to Lima, where he completed his secondary education at the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe national school. While still a schoolboy, he founded the magazine La Idea Gua-dalupana with his classmate Manuel Bedoya. , beginning in the cultivation of letters. At the end of his secondary studies he entered the School of Engineers, which he later abandoned to enroll in the Faculty of Letters of the University of San Marcos, in 1911. Here he founded the "Billinghurst University Club", which led to the candidacy of Guillermo Billinghurst to the presidency of the Republic. In journalism he began with a caricature published on September 1, 1906 in the magazine Applause and Silbidos, to continue in News in 1907. He later achieved notoriety also as a cartoonist in Monos y Monadas and in Gil Blas . His first poem of his, «My soul has lived», was published on July 15, 1909 in the magazine Contemporáneos .
Incorporated into the army in the face of the danger of a conflagration with Ecuador, he became known as a prose writer with the publication of the chronicles that he sent to El Diario from the Military School of Chorrillos. under the title «With the Algerian in the wind»; chronicles that began on April 12, 1910. his success was consolidated with two novels: The dead city and The city of consumptives , published in 1911 in Peruvian Illustration and in Varieties , respectively.
In 1912 he disputed the presidency of the university center of the University of San Marcos with Alberto Ulloa Sotomayor, representative of the capital's students. Valdelomar, who represented the provincial group, lost the elections. However, when Billinghurst became president of the Republic, he appointed him director of the official newspaper El Peruano ; and later, in 1913, he sent him to Rome as a member of the Peruvian delegation.
Trips outside Peru
In May 1913 he left the port of Callao in the direction of Panama, then traveled to the United States, to finally arrive in Europe, from where he writes for La Nación of Lima his «Chronicles of Rome». In Italy he also writes «El Caballero Carmelo», a story with which he won the prize of La Nación, in the same year of 1913, so significant for his life. He enrolled at the University of Rome, but in the face of Colonel Óscar R. Benavides' coup d'état (which deposed Billinghurst on February 4, 1914), Abraham Valdelomar opted to resign his diplomatic post. However, before returning to Lima, he toured Florence, Milan, Marseille and Paris.
Return to Peru of Abraham Valdelomar
Once in Peru, La Prensa de Lima welcomed him as editor. In this newspaper he had, until 1918, a section called «Words». He signed his publications, in general, with the pseudonym "Count of Lemos", among others. The same year of his arrival (1914) he wrote the fictionalized biography of Doña Francisca Zubiaga Bernales de Gamarra, "La Maríscala", which he later took to the theater in collaboration with José Carlos Mariátegui. At that time he also composed his Chinese tales and his Yankee tales , and another group of stories under the title of The children of the Sun .
In 1916 he founded and directed the magazine Colónida , which brought together the most representative of the Peruvian intelligentsia of the time. Only four numbers came out with the portraits on the cover of José Santos Chocano, José María Eguren, Javier Prado and Percy Gibson, respectively, made by Abraham Valdelomar himself, who also collaborated with the lyrical notes entitled «Falsa Cover», as well as with other items. In the magazine Mundo Limeño His short novel Yerbasanta appeared in two installments . In 1917 he won the prize of the Circle of Journalists contest with his essay "The psychology of buzzards". Around that time, his texts appeared in Variedades, Sudamericana, Almanaque de la Prensa and "El Caballero Carmelo" and "Belmonte el Tragico" came to light.
Again, following political motivations, he toured and gave lectures. He traveled to the northern provinces of the country and then headed south, visiting the departments of Arequipa, Puno, Cuzco and Moquegua. Back in his homeland, he was unanimously acclaimed by the Ica population. Hence, on September 24, 1919, Abraham Valdelomar was elected deputy for lca before the Regional Congress of the Center, based in the city of Ayacucho, where due to a tragic accident, he died on November 3, 1919 , at 33 years of age . In a suggestive essay, «The flight of the poet», Julio Ramón Ribeyro noted that:«Were it not for this accident, by simple deduction, the physiognomy of our literature would have changed. He had written the most beautiful stories of Peru, some immortal verses, very audacious novels for his time, plays, essays and chronicles of inimitable grace. With it, a probability, a course, an unfinished map of our spiritual space disappeared.”