Miguel de Unamuno

Unamuno taught Greek and served repeated terms as rector of the University of Salamanca, becoming the philosophical center of the Generation of '98, the group of writers grappling with Spain's decline after its defeat in the Spanish-American War. His restless arguments with his own Catholic faith run through everything he wrote, fiction included.

Exiled from 1924 to 1930 for opposing Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he returned to Salamanca only to confront fascism again within a decade: in October 1936, weeks into the Spanish Civil War, he publicly denounced a Falangist general to his face at a university ceremony, was placed under house arrest, and died there weeks later that same year.

Mist (1914), his best-known 'nivola,' turns metafiction into an argument with mortality, staged between an author and the character who refuses to accept his own death.