The Spanish novelist and essayist Pío Baroja y Nessi (1872-1956) ranks as one of the major writers of Spain's Generation of 1898. His many works consistently reveal harsh criticism of his country and a pessimistic view of life.

Pío Baroja was born on Dec. 28, 1872, in San Sebastián. In 1879 the family moved to Madrid, where at 15 he began to study medicine. He received his doctorate in medicine at the University of Madrid in 1893 and spent the next year as a country doctor in Cestona, a small Basque town. Disgusted by the hardships and petty intrigues of country life, Baroja renounced his medical post in 1895 and the following year joined his brother Ricardo in managing a bakery in Madrid. The shock of the Spanish-American War in 1898 provoked in him, as in many of his contemporaries, a poraries, a protest against Spain's social abuses and the...