Famous Spanish novelist: Who is Vicente Blasco Ibânez?

(1867-1928) Spanish novelist. He gained international fame with his popular novels about World War I. He was born in January 1867, in Valencia. After studying law for a short time, he started journalism. He worked for a publishing house that published adventure novels to earn money. After leaving here, he had difficulty in publishing his first novels, which he wrote under his own signature. His liberal political views caused him to spend his life in prison and exile. He fled to France. After returning from an amnesty, he founded the Republican journal El Pueblo in 1891. In 1909 he toured South America. He spent the last five years of his life in France. He died on January 28, 1928, in Mentone.

His early works are regionalist novels that deal with different aspects of life in the Valencia region. The middle class and commercial life in Arroz y tartana (“Rice and Sal”), published in 1894, the struggles between Landlords and farmers in Huerta in La barraca (“Adobe Roofs”), published in 1898, Cariasy, published in 1902. Barro (“Reed and Mud”), on the other hand, describes the lives of rice planters and fishermen in a naturalistic style that also reflects their political views.

In his later novels, discussion of social evils takes precedence over regional realism. Sangre y arena ("Bloody Arena"), published in 1908, is an example of this style. Sangre y Arena is one of the most popular novels in Spain, which deals with the Spain of that period in a critical way within the framework of the story of a poor young man who is a world-class bullfighter. This work, in which the famous actor Rudolph Valentino played, made the author known outside of his country.

Considered his masterpiece, Los cuatro jinetes del apocalipsis ("The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse") was published in 1916. This novel about the war was the subject of two separate films made in the USA and became one of the best-selling books in the USA, together with the novel Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”), which was published in 1917.

Blasco Ibanez is one of the representatives of the realist-regional Spanish novel that started to revive at the beginning of the 19th century. While a naturalistic style predominates in his novels, he also included elements of passion, excitement, and imagination. Especially in war novels, which became popular in the USA rather than Spain, he tended to a narrative style based on excitement and tension.