Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Valencian novelist, travel writer and politician born in 1867.    Ibáñez achieved what most other Spanish writers only dreamed of  - International popularity.  Vicente was a member of the Republican party and editor of El Pueblo, an antimonarchist newspaper.  In 1896, he was arrested because of his political views and actions and served nearly two year's hard labor. Vicente was eventually exiled from Spain in 1923.   Due to the popularity of his later works, Ibáñez was a very wealthy man when he passed away in 1928

His novels can be easily classified into basic genres: regional, psychological, historical and Cosmopolitan.  Ibáñez achieved his greatest success from the cosmopolitan European novels, of which Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1916) is the best.  This is a tragic and suspenseful novel of World War I and its' effects on society.  Other novels in this genre include: Mare Nostrum (1918), and Los enemigos de la mujer (1919), both of which are also war novels.

His best novels are of the regional genre, which take place in his native Valencia.  These are his earliest works and they offer an intensely vivid depiction of the social problems affecting this region and realistically portray the lives of Valencia's citizens, including bullfighters, fishermen, and politicians.  Vicente's masterpiece, Cañas y Barro (Reeds and Mud, 1902), falls within this genre and successfully transports the reader into the small fishing village of Albufera.  This novel effectively depicts the bitter conflict between different generations of fishermen, interlaced with a tragic love story of forbidden love and its' shocking consequences.