Spanish · 1872–1956
Baroja qualified as a doctor, practised for less than two years in a Basque village, ran his aunt's Madrid bakery, and then wrote around a hundred books in a deliberately unpolished style he defended as the only honest one. He grouped his novels in trilogies and wrote a twenty-two volume cycle about a nineteenth-century conspirator based on his own great-uncle. He was a pessimist, an anticlerical, a solitary who despised political parties of every kind, and a man whose prose moves at the speed of walking. Hemingway visited him on his deathbed in Madrid to tell him he should have had the Nobel, and later said he had learned from him how to write a sentence without decoration. Baroja was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1935 and spent the Civil War in France.