Miguel de Unamuno (29 September 1864 - 31 December 1936) was a Basque essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher. His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion (1917), a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story. Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao, a port city of Basque Country, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo. As a young man, he was interested in the Basque language and competed for a teaching position in the Instituto de Bilbao against Sabino Arana. The contest was finally won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue. Unamuno worked in all major genres: the essay, the novel, poetry, and theater, and, as a modernist, contributed greatly to dissolving the boundaries between genres. There is some debate as to whether Unamuno was in fact a member of the Generation of '98, an ex post facto literary group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers that was the creation of José Martínez Ruiz - a group that includes Antonio Machado, Azorín, Pío Baroja, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramiro de Maeztu, and Ángel Ganivet, among others. Unamuno was a well-known lusophile, being probably the best Spanish connoisseur of Portuguese culture, literature, and history of his time. He believed it was as important for a Spaniard to become familiar with the great names of Portuguese literature as with those of Catalan literature. He was also a supporter of Iberian Federalism. In the final analysis Unamuno's significance is that he was one of a number of notable interwar intellectuals, along with luminaries such as Julien Benda, Karl Jaspers, Johan Huizinga, and José Ortega y Gasset, who resisted the intrusion of ideology into western intellectual life.[4] source (with more information): Wikipedia