Books with author Vicente Blasco Ibeíeez

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Vicente Blasco Ibeíe?ez is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Vicente Blasco Ibeíe?ez then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.

The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse (Spanish: Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis) is a novel by the Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, first published in 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. Its 1918 English translation by Charlotte Brewster Jordan became the best-selling novel in the U.S in 1919 according to Publishers Weekly, who hailed it as "a superbly human story told by a genius". The novel was included in the list of 100 best novels of the twentieth century by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.A Frenchman named Marcelo Desnoyers travels to Argentina in 1870, and he marries the elder daughter of Julio Madariaga, the owner of a ranch. Eventually Marcelo, his wife, and his children Julio and Chichi move back to France and live in a mansion in Paris. Julio turns out to be a spoiled, lazy young man who avoids commitments and flirts with a married woman named Marguerite Laurier.Meanwhile, Madariaga's younger daughter has married a German man named Karl Hartrott, and the Hartrotts move back to Germany. The Desnoyers family and the Hartrott family are thus set against each other with the onset of World War I. However, Julio Desnoyers initially shows no interest in the war, while Hartrott's family eagerly supports the German cause. It is only after Julio's lover, Marguerite, lavishes attention upon her husband after the latter is wounded in battle, that Julio is moved to participate in the war.While young Julio Desnoyers serves as a soldier, the aging Marcelo Desnoyers leaves the shelter and returns to his mansion, where he watches the German soldiers advance and eventually plunder his belongings and eat his food. At last the French soldiers push back the German soldiers, and Marcelo chooses to defend a German man who had earlier spared Marcelo's life.Julio Desnoyers returns to his family, wounded in a battle but praised for his valour, and he quickly sets out again to continue fighting. At the close of the war, Julio is killed in battle. The novel ends with Marcelo at his son's grave, regretting that if his daughter, Chichi, has any children, they will not bear the name "Desnoyers." Marcelo finds that Hartrott, too, has lost a son in the war.

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was born in Valencia, Spain on 29th January 1867. At university, he studied law and graduated in 1888 but never felt the urgency to practice - he was more interested in politics, journalism, literature and women. Politically he was a militant Republican partisan and, in his youth, founded a newspaper, El Pueblo (The People). The newspaper was taken to court many times and he made many enemies. In one incident he was shot and almost killed. In 1896, Ibáñez was arrested and sentenced to a few months in prison.Despite this colourful background he found time to write novels. His first published work was ‘La Araña Negra’ (The Black Spider) in 1892, a work that he later repudiated although at the time it was a useful vehicle for him to express his anti-clerical views.In 1894, he published ‘Arroz y Tartana’ (Airs and Graces), about a late 19th Century widow in Valencia trying to keep up appearances in order to marry her daughters well. Ibáñez’s next sequence of books studied rural life in the farmlands of Valencia and failed to gain much of an audience. His writing now took on a new direction with its now familiar sensational and melodramatic themes in 1908 with ‘Sangre y Arena’ (Blood and Sand), which follows the career of Juan Gallardo from his poor beginnings as a child in Seville, to his rise to becoming a famous matador in MadridHowever, his greatest success was ‘Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) in 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. It was a literary and commercial sensation and became the best-selling book of 1919. It also propelled Rudolph Valentino to stardom in the 1921 film.Ironically his fame in the English-speaking world has come not as a novelist but as the stories behind some of Hollywood’s greatest silent movies.Vicente Blasco Ibáñez died in Menton, France on January 28th, 1928, the day before his 61st birthday.

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