Apparently he never practiced his profession, but became a journalist almost immediately.

He was instinctively a revolutionist, and was imprisoned in Barcelona, the home of revolution, for some political offence, when he was eighteen.
It does not appear whether he committed his popular offence in the Republican newspaper which he established in Valencia; but it is certain that he was elected a Republican deputy to the Cortes, where he became a leader of his party, while yet evidently of no great maturity.
He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, and of a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather stronger than I have myself seen it.

Every young writer forms himself upon some older writer; nobody begins master; but Ibanez became master while he was yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very strongly the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, _La Barraca_, or The Cabin, which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia, studied at first hand and probably from personal knowledge.

It is not a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a _novela de costumbres_, or novel of manners, as we used to call the kind.

Ibanez has in fact never written anything but novels of manners, and _La Barraca_ pictures a neighborhood where a stranger takes up a waste tract of land and tries to make a home for himself and family.
This makes enemies of all his neighbors who after an interval of pity for the newcomer in the loss of one of his children return to their cruelty and render the place impossible to him.