The quintessential bourgeois of Catalan literature was born at the beginning of the 20th century, when Santiago Rusiñol (Barcelona, ​​1861 - Aranjuez, 1931) adopted the popular expression "Señor Esteve" and turned it into a novel. Published in 1907, Mr. Esteve's Auca This story about a shopkeeper in Barcelona's Ribera district and his son Ramonet, who doesn't want to follow in the family footsteps but instead wants to become an artist, created both admirers and detractors. With the eponymous play, premiered in 1917, Esteve took the definitive leap and established himself as an undisputed protagonist of Catalan culture: the prototype of a sensible and thrifty man, bourgeois and conservative in spirit. That archetype remains alive more than a century later and has cemented the novel as an essential classic of our literature. Now, the Barcino publishing house has reissued it in the original language of the first publication, along with the rhyming couplets of Gabriel Alomar and the drawings of Ramon Casas, in an edition with an introduction by Margarida Casacuberta, professor and researcher of contemporary literature.