José Martínez Ruiz

José Martínez Ruiz, known as Azorín, was a Spanish writer of the Generation of '98, active from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. He worked as a novelist, essayist and literary critic, and he is remembered for a spare prose style and a fresh way of looking at the Spanish landscape and the classics.

Born in Monóvar, in the province of Alicante, in 1873, he studied with the Escolapios in Yecla and then law in Valencia, where he came into contact with krausism, anarchism and journalism. From 1896, working from Madrid, he wrote for newspapers and magazines. The autobiographical trilogy he began with La voluntad (1902) gave him the pseudonym under which he would eventually sign his work. Early on he criticised the Restoration political system, but over time he came to work within it, serving as a deputy in several parliaments between 1907 and 1919 and holding posts in public instruction. He wrote for ABC and later for La Vanguardia, and during the Second Republic he edited the Revista de Occidente.

His style is marked by short sentences, plain syntax, a traditional Castilian vocabulary and series of two or three adjectives. Critics often link it to an impressionism close to French and Belgian symbolism. As an essayist he focused on the Castilian landscape and on rereading the classics, as in Ruta de Don Quijote (1905) and Castilla (1912), where his cyclical sense of time is usually connected to Schopenhauer rather than Nietzsche. After the Civil War he spent time in France and returned with help from Ramón Serrano Suñer, which obliged him to accept Franco's regime. He joined the Royal Spanish Academy in 1924 and died in Madrid in 1967. Today he is placed within the wider literary renewal of early twentieth-century Europe, and his remains have rested in Monóvar since 1990.