Jamalzadeh's father, Sayyed Jamal ad-Din Esfahani, was a progressive mullah and preacher who became a constitutional revolutionary, delivering raging sermons that inspired his son but cost him his life; he was executed in 1908 on the order of Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar who considered him among the most dangerous of his enemies.

After his father's death, Jamalzadeh's life took a turn for the worse, but thanks to many supporting friends and to occasional paid teaching jobs, he survived starvation.

By the time of World War I, still in his early age, he joined the Committee of Iranian Patriots (Komita-ye Melliyun-e Irāni) in Berlin and, in 1915, founded a newspaper (Rastakhiz) for this group in Baghdad.

His later years, until 1931 when he settled in Geneva and worked thereafter for the International Labour Organization, were spent in temporary employments, such as one at the Iranian embassy in Berlin.

His preoccupation with the use of language and his Dickensian style of writing, including repetitions, piling up of adjectives, and using popular phrases, quickly remind the reader of Jamalzadeh's background and of his sincere intentions.

The masseur continued to tell his story of being placed into the role of an advisor, the respect and high position that he gained by chance, and his less-than-positive judgment of Iranians from an outsider's perspective.

He quickly realizes that the stories in the diary are written by an uneducated man, who views Iran with the prejudice that the whole world should be like Europe.

The European masseur's observations come off as naïve and limited due to his ignorance, but they serve as a social satire that Jamalzadeh uses as a literary strategy to exemplify a humorous but eye-opening perspective on Iranian society.

An example that the author uses to recount this point across is in the Moayyed and Sprachman translation: "Habit truly is like a beggar from Samaria or a pet cat or a Jew owed money or an Isfahani jakesraker: no matter how many times you throw it out one door, it'll always return through another".

He began writing again in the 1940s, but by that time he had lost the dexterity that imparted conciseness, novelty of form, originality of ideas, a biting sense of humor, and a tight structure to his earlier stories.

Tautologism, a tendency toward using sage remarks, making mystical and philosophical speculations, and disregard for order became the hallmark of his later writings.

Sahra-ye Mahshar (Armageddon) (1947), Talkh-o Shirin (Bitter and Sweet) (1955), Kohne va Now (Old and New) (1959), Qair az Khoda Hichkas Nabud (None Existed Except God) (1961), Asman-o Risman (The Blue Yonder and Rope) (1965), Qesse-ha-ye Kutah Bara-ye Bachcheha-ye Rish-dar (Short Stories for Bearded Children [i.e. for Adults]) (1974), and Qesse-ye Ma be Akhar Rasid[9] (Thus Ends Our Story) (1979) were written during this phase of his literary activity.

Although Jamalzadeh continued to criticize the court and the clergy, some of his works of this period lack his original unique Persian style, even though he is at times as biting and as veracious as in his earlier writings.

Jamalzadeh was nominated for the 1965, 1967, and 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature by Richard N. Frye, Ehsan Yarshater, and Jes Peter Asmussen respectively.