The Torrent

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867-1928) was a Spanish realist novelist writing in Spanish, a screenwriter and occasional film director. While Sangre y Arena (Blood and Sand) (1908) and Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) (1916) are his most popular novels, particularly outside of Spain, his Valencian novels such as La Barraca (1898) and Canas y Barro are the ones most valued by scholars. He was a militant Republican partisan in his youth and founded a newspaper, El Pueblo (translated as either The Town or The People) in his hometown. The newspaper aroused so much controversy that it was brought to court many times and censored. He volunteered as the proofreader for the novel Noli Me Tangere, in which the Filipino patriot José Rizal expressed his contempt of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. He travelled to Argentina in 1909 where two new cities, Nueva Valencia and Cervantes, were created. He gave conferences on historical events and Spanish literature.