a large portion of Spanish literature was virtually unavailable to the public. In 1924, he was elected to the Real Academia Española. His first of a dozen plays, Old Spain, appeared in 1926, followed by Brandy mucho brandy and La comedia del arte, but had difficulty in adapting his slow and meticulous style to the dynamics and rhythm of drama. A wry comedy about journalists increasing newspaper sales by inventing stories, El Clamor (The Cry), led to the leadership of the Asociación de la Prensa expelling him, an act which Azorín likened to that of the Inquisition. He began to be influenced by the avant-garde movement, experimenting in a personal version of surrealism in a short trilogy, Lo invisible (The Invisible). The outbreak of the Republic saw him re-adopt his old progressive political ideals. He abandoned ABC to write for the republican newspapers El Sol, La Libertad and Ahora). He edited Revista de Occidente, founded by José Ortega y Gasset, a journal promoting European philosophy, from 1923 to 1936. At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, Azorín fled to Paris, where he continued his literary career writing for the Argentine newspaper La Nación. A book reflecting on this period of exile, Españoles en París, was published in 1939. When he returned to Spain on 23 August 1939, he found himself in "inner exile", along with other intellectuals who had not overtly supported the Franco regime during the conflict. He was at first denied a press identification card (tarjeta de periodista), but was supported by Ramón Serrano Suñer, at that time Franco's Interior Minister and president of the Falange. Accepting Franco’s regime was the price he had to pay in order to be admitted back, and he aligned with the dictatorship in a noted article in the right-wing journal Vértice. He contributed again to ABC from 1941 to 1962. He published numerous new works which were redolent of his earlier literary successes, including Pensando en España and Sintiendo España. Later life In his old age, Azorín became a film enthusiast, writing numerous articles, some of which are reprinted in El cine y el momento, and claiming that "Cinema is the greatest form of art". He died in Madrid, Spain on March 2, 1967, at the age of 93. The political evolution that transformed Ruiz, a committed journalist as well as a revolutionary anarchist, into Azorín, a conservative member