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Miguel de Unamuno

(1864-1936), Spain.

The leader of the Generation of '98, a group of the most distinguished literary figures of Spain at the turn of the century, Unamuno is an extraordinary intellectual of European and international projection, sharing with José Ortega y Gasset the position of chief Spanish philosopher of his time.

He was president of the University of Salamanca and professor of Greek. An erudite person familiar with the most important cultural and philosophical figures, past and present (he learned Danish in order to read Kierkegaard), Unamuno was himself an insightful thinker. His anguish at having lost his faith in immortality produced two of his best works, The Tragic Sense of Life and Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr. Another of his novels, Niebla (Fog), 1914, a Kierkegaardian exploration of man's existential reality, or lack thereof, contains a famous passage in which the protagonist confronts his author, Unamuno, to plead his own case when he realizes that the latter is planning to let him die.

Thus, Unamuno anticipated by almost a decade Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922.

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