Miguel de Unamuno

Born in 1864, Unamuno moved between genres—essays, novels, poetry, plays—always circling the same raw question: what does it mean to want to believe when reason won't allow it? In 1913 he published Tragic Sense of Life, his major philosophical work on the collision between faith and doubt. A year later came Mist, now considered the defining Spanish Modernist novel, and in 1917 Abel Sánchez recast Cain and Abel as a study in consuming envy. He held a university post but spent his life in the gap between certainty and despair. He died on the last day of 1936.