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Vicente Blasco Ib�nez (1867 - 1928) was a journalist, politician and best-selling Spanish novelist in various genres whose most widespread and lasting fame in the English-speaking world is from Hollywood films adapted from his works.His greatest personal success probably came from the novel Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) (1916), which tells a tangled tale of the French and German sons-in-law of an Argentinian land-owner who find themselves fighting on opposite sides in the First World War. When this was filmed by Rex Ingram in 1921, it became the vehicle that propelled Rudolph Valentino to stardom.

En 1924, en la cumbre de su fama, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez decide viajar a uno de los países más peligrosos en esos momentos. Ocupada por varias potencias extranjeras e invadida por Japón, la joven y débil República china se encuentra al borde del colapso y de la guerra civil. El escritor valenciano nos hace una lúcida descripción de todas sus vivencias por el gigante asiático siendo el resultado un documento de incalculable valor, imprescindible para comprender la convulsa historia de China después del derrocamiento del Imperio de los manchúes. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867-1928) fue un escritor, político y periodista. Cosechó un gran éxito con sus novelas, sobre todo en Estados Unidos, donde gozaba de una inmensa fama, siendo sus obras trasladadas al cine a mediados de los años 20. Con un estilo directo, conciso y un análisis crítico y lúcido, Blasco Ibáñez es uno de los mejores escritores en lengua castellana.

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The Four Hoursemen of the apocalypse byVicente Blasco Ibanez

Blunders of this sort ought no longer to be possible. If American scholarship is not a sham, this reform, which is imperative, must be immediate. Blasco Ib��ez was born in Valencia, that most typical of the cities of the eastern littoral along the Mediterranean, known as the Spanish Levant. The Valencian dialect is directly affiliated with the neighboring Catalan, and through it with the Proven�al rather than with the Castilian of the interior plateau. In the character of the people there is a facility which suggests the French, while an oriental element is distinctly evident, persisting not only from the days of the Moorish kingdoms, but eloquent of the shipping of the East and the lingua franca of the inland sea.

Translated from the Spanish by Dr. Isaac Goldberg.

In Sangre y Arena (Blood and Sand, written in 1908) Blasco Ibáñez attacks the Spanish national sport. With characteristic thoroughness, approaching his subject from the psychological, the historical, the national, the humane, the dramatic and narrative standpoint, he evolves another of his notable documents, worthy of a place among the great tracts of literary history. His process, like his plot, is simple; whether attacking the Church or the evils of drink, or the bloodlust of the bull ring, his methods are usually the same. He provides a protagonist who shall serve as the vehicle or symbol of his ideas, surrounding him with minor personages intended to serve as a foil or as a prop. He fills in the background with all the wealth of descriptive and coloring powers at his command-and these powers are as highly developed in Ibáñez, I believe, as in any living writer. The beauty of Blasco Ibáñez's descriptions-a beauty by no means confined to the pictures he summons to the mind-is that, at their best, they rise to interpretation. He not only brings before the eye a vivid image, but communicates to the spirit an intellectual reaction. Here he is the master who penetrates beyond the exterior into the inner significance; the reader is carried into the swirl of the action itself, for the magic of the author's pen imparts a sense of palpitant actuality; you are yourself a soldier at the Marne, you fairly drown with Ulises in his beloved Mediterranean, you defend the besieged city of Saguntum, you pant with the swordsman in the bloody arena. This gift of imparting actuality to his scenes is but another evidence of the Spaniard's dynamic personality; he lives his actions so thoroughly that we live them with him; his gift of second sight gives us to see beyond amphitheatres of blood and sand into national character, beyond a village struggle into the vexed problem of land, labor and property. Against this type of background develops the characteristic Ibáñez plot, by no mean