Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

He ran Valencia before Hollywood ran him. Novelist, deputy, founder of a newspaper that kept landing him in court. The early books are the huerta: rice, mud, orange groves, people who work and starve in the same light. Then he went wide — the war, the ring, Argentina, a bestseller the silent pictures turned into Valentino. Republican, anticlerical, shot at, exiled. Sangre y arena is one of the later moods. The Valencian novels are the ground he stood on.