This extensive genre includes Cervantes' Rinconete y Cortadillo and El coloquio de los perros, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

It was the Antwerp version that circulated throughout Europe, translated into French (1560), English (1576), Dutch (after the northern, largely Protestant Seven Provinces of the Low Countries revolted against Spain in 1579), German (1617), and Italian (1622).

The "worm's eye view" of society contrasted sharply with the more conventional literary focus on superhuman exploits recounted in chivalric romances such as the hugely popular Amadís de Gaula.

Significantly, the only named characters are Lazarillo and his family: his mother Antoña Pérez, his father Tomé Gonzáles, and his stepfather El Zayde.

(There is an old mill on the river, and a statue of Lazarillo and the blind man next to the Roman bridge [puente romano] in the city.)

In contrast to the fancifully poetic language devoted to fantastic and supernatural events about unbelievable creatures and chivalric knights, the realistic prose of Lazarillo described suppliants purchasing indulgences from the Church, servants forced to die with their masters on the battlefield (as Lazarillo's father did), thousands of refugees wandering from town to town, poor beggars flogged away by whips because of the lack of food.

The Prologue with Lázaro's extensive protest against injustice is addressed to a high-level cleric, and five of his eight masters in the novel serve the church.

Besides creating a new genre, Lazarillo de Tormes was critically innovative in world literature in several aspects: In his book Don Quixote, Cervantes introduces a gypsy thief called Ginés de Pasamonte who claims to be a writer (and who later in Part II masquerades as a puppeteer while on the run).

The self-indulgent cleric concentrates on feeding himself, and when he does decide to give the "crumbs from his table" to Lazarillo, he says, "toma, come, triunfa, para tí es el mundo" "take, eat, triumph – the world is yours" a clear parody of a key communion statement.

Given the subversive nature of Lazarillo and its open criticism of the Catholic Church, it is likely that the author chose to remain anonymous out of fear of religious persecution.

The earliest known editions are the four of Alcalá de Henares, Antwerp, Medina del Campo, and Burgos, all of which appeared in 1554.

There has been some suggestion that the author was originally of Jewish extraction, but in 1492 had had to convert to Catholicism to avoid being expelled from Spain; that might explain the animosity towards the Catholic Church displayed in the book.

Documents brought to light by the Spanish palaeographer Mercedes Agulló in 2010 support the hypothesis that the author was, in fact, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza.

[3] In 2023, researchers Mariano Calvo and José María Martínez have proposed and documented that the most likely author of "El Lazarillo" might be Juan de Valdés.

They found their hypothesis on biographical, historical and linguistic recurrences between "El Lazarillo" and Valdes' works,[4] and specially, Valdés' Diálogo de la lengua.