Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

His first published novel was La araña negra ("The Black Spider") in 1892. The immature work that he later repudiated was a study of the connections between a noble Spanish family and the Jesuits throughout the 19th century. It seems to have been a vehicle for him to express his anticlerical views.

In 1894, he published his first mature work, the novel Arroz y tartana (Airs and Graces). The story is about a widow in late-19th-century Valencia trying to keep up appearances to marry her daughters well. His next books consist of detailed studies of aspects of rural life in the farmlands of Valencia, the so-called huerta that the Moorish colonizers had created to grow crops such as rice, vegetables and oranges, with a carefully planned irrigation system in an otherwise arid landscape. The concern with depicting the details of this lifestyle qualifies what he called an example of costumbrismo:

Flor de mayo (1895) ('Mayflower')

La barraca (1898) ('The Hut')

Entre naranjos (1900) ('Between Orange Trees')

Cañas y barro (1902) ('Reeds and Mud')

The works also show the influence of naturalism, which he would most likely have assimilated through reading Émile Zola. The characters in the works are determined by the interaction of heredity, environment, and social conditions (race, milieu et moment), and the novelist is acting as a kind of scientist drawing out the influences that act upon them at any given moment. They are powerful works but are sometimes flawed by heavy-handed didactic elements. For example, in La Barraca, the narrator often preaches the need for these ignorant people to be better educated. There is also a strong political element as he shows how destructive it is for the poor farmworkers to be fighting one another rather than uniting against their true oppressors – the church and the landowners. However, along the preaching are lyrical and highly detailed accounts of how the irrigation canals are managed and of the workings of the age-old "tribunal de las aguas", a court composed of farmers that meets weekly near Valencia Cathedral to decide which farm gets to receive water and when and arbitrates on disputes on access to water. Cañas y barro is often adjudged the masterpiece of that phase of Blasco Ibáñez's writings.

After that, his writing changed markedly. He left behind costumbrismo and Naturalism and began to set his novels in more cosmopolitan locations than the huerta of Valencia. His plots became more sensational and melodramatic. Academic criticism of him in the English-speaking world has largely ignored those works, but they form by far the majority of his published output: some 30 works. Some of these works attracted the attention of Hollywood studios and became the basis of celebrated films.

Prominently, Sangre y arena (Blood and Sand, 1908), which follows the career of Juan Gallardo from his poor beginnings as a child in Seville to his rise to celebrity as a matador in Madrid, where he falls under the spell of the seductive Doña Sol, which leads to his downfall. Ibáñez directed a 65 min film version in 1916. There were three remakes in 1922, 1941 and 1989.

His greatest personal success probably came from the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916), which tells a tangled tale of the French and German sons-in-law of an Argentinian landowner who find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the First World War. When it was filmed by Rex Ingram in 1921, it became the vehicle that propelled Rudolph Valentino to stardom.

Rex Ingram also filmed Mare Nostrum, a spy story from 1918 that was filmed in 1926 as a vehicle for his wife Alice Terry at his MGM studio in Nice. Michael Powell claimed in his memoirs that he had his first experience of working in films on that production.

A further two Hollywood films can be singled out, as they were the first films that were made by Greta Garbo following her arrival at MGM in Hollywood: The Torrent (based on Entre naranjos from 1900) and The Temptress (derived from La Tierra de Todos from 1922).