[3] Pérez de Ayala was educated at Jesuit schools, the experience of which he satirized in the novel A.M.D.G.

Like his political ally José Ortega y Gasset, he was a liberal republican and opposed to the Spanish monarchy, as well as a professed Anglophile who sought to import the English parliamentary system to Spain.

[5] He was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1928, and received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1931, 1934 and 1947.

He was appointed director of the Prado Museum in 1931 a position that he left temporarily in 1932 to become the Spanish ambassador to Britain.

After 1916, his novels became increasingly mature and lyrical, his characters becoming symbolic representatives of general human problems.