José Martínez Ruiz
 Portrait of Azorín by Zuloaga
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José Augusto Trinidad Martínez Ruiz, better known by his pseudonym Azorín (Spanish pronunciation: [aθoˈɾin]; June 8, 1873, Monòver – March 2, 1967, Madrid), was a Spanish novelist, essayist and literary critic. As a political radical in the 1890s, he moved steadily to the right. In literature he attempted to define the eternal qualities of Spanish life. His essays and criticism are written in a simple, compact style. Particularly notable are his impressionistic descriptions of Castilian towns and landscape.
José ("Pepe") Martínez Ruiz was born in Monovar, a village in the province of Alicante on 8 June 1873. Known as Pepe, he was the oldest of nine children but a lonely child who loved reading. His father, a middle-class lawyer, was an active conservative politician and later became a representative and mayor, and a follower of Romero Robledo. His mother, a landowner, was born in nearby Petrer.
From the age of eight, until he was 16, he attended a boarding school run by the Escolapius Fathers (Piarists) in his father's home town of Yecla in the province of Murcia, a time he recalled as opposed to “truth, rebelliousness, and freedom” in Memorias inmemoriales, but also nostalgically in Las confesiones de un pequeño filósofo.
From 1888 to 1896 he studied law at the University of Valencia, but did not complete his studies. Instead, he began to write, publishing a monograph on literary criticism in 1893. Here he began to write for local newspapers, contributing articles to the radical journal El pueblo, edited by Blasco Ibáñez. He became interested in the ideas of Karl Krause, who argued that man could be reformed through education, and that openness to other nation's cultures could overcome national conservatism (see [in Spanish]).
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