In 1931 he published El doctor Rip, and the following year, Laia, novels that move away from the then-fashionable theoretical formulas of the aesthetics of the Catalan Noucentisme movement.

In these books, Espriu's prose alternately shifts from grotesque distortion to an aestheticising lyricism, probably under the influence of Spanish-language modernists Valle-Inclán and Gabriel Miró).

In 1939, in occupied Barcelona and before the military conflict ended, he wrote a play, Antígona (published in 1955 and opened in 1958), on the subject of fratricidal war and compassion for the losers.

Espriu, who had begun to write poetry before the war, did not publish his first volume of poems until 1946: Cementiri de Sinera, an elegy with a great formal sobriety.

In Les cançons d'Ariadna (1949) he collected a series of poems from various periods that contrasted satire and distortion with elegy and lyricism and in which the mythological subjects can be found that were to appear in subsequent works.

[1] The tremendous public success of La pell de brau (1960) signified the popular recognition of Espriu: the author posed the historical drama of Sepharad (poet's nickname for Spain after the Jewish usage) in poems with a high spiritual, moral and political resonance.

The bibliography of Espriu contains two more poems, included in the first volume of his Complete works (1968) (Per al llibre de salms d'aquests vells cecs and Fragments.

Perhaps the most important virtue and originality of Espriu has been his capacity to reconcile, in the same unitary work, the spiritual problems of man, with metaphysical resonances, with his fate as a member of a group subjected to social and political tensions, while posing the great questions of justice and liberty.