Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (Spanish pronunciation: [biˈθente ˈβlaskojˈβaɲeθ], 29 January 1867 – 28 January 1928) was a journalist, politician, and a bestselling Spanish novelist in various genres whose most widespread and lasting fame in the English-speaking world is from Hollywood films that were adapted from his works.

Biography

He was born in Valencia. At university, he studied law and graduated in 1888 but never went into practice since he was more interested in politics, journalism, and literature. He was a particular fan of Miguel de Cervantes.

In politics, he was a militant Republican partisan in his youth, and he founded the newspaper El Pueblo (translated as The People) in his hometown, in which he developed a Republican populist political movement known as Blasquismo. The newspaper aroused so much controversy that it was taken to court many times. In 1896, he was arrested and sentenced to a few months in prison. He made many enemies. He was shot, and almost killed, in one dispute; the bullet was caught in the clasp of his belt. He had several stormy love affairs.

He volunteered as the proofreader for the novel Noli Me Tángere in which the Filipino patriot José Rizal expressed his contempt for the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.

He traveled to Argentina in 1909 where two new settlements, Nueva Valencia, and Cervantes, were created. He gave conferences on historical events and Spanish literature. Tired and disgusted with government failures and inaction, he moved to Paris at the beginning of the First World War. Living in Paris, he had been introduced to the poet and writer Robert W. Service by their mutual publisher Fisher Unwin, who asked Service to act as an interpreter for a contract concerning Ibáñez.