In 1888 he started to study law at University of Santiago de Compostela, and there he published his first story, Babel, at the Café con gotas magazine.

In spite of his economic difficulties, he started to have a name in the tertulias (literary gatherings) of many culturally significant coffeehouses in Madrid, such as Café Gijón, and to be noticed for his dandy attitude and his eccentric looks.

Because one of those, at Café de la Montaña in 1899, an unfortunate stick wound by writer Manuel Bueno caused one of his cufflinks to inlay in his arm.

In 1910 he traveled for six months to various Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia) escorting his wife on an acting tour.

Also, the government of the Second Spanish Republic appointed him Curator of the National Artistic Heritage,[4] but his confrontations with the Ministry because of the bad state of the palaces and museums under his direction forced his resigning.

He despised literary realism and openly disregarded Benito Pérez Galdós, its most prominent Spanish representative.

Works by Valle-Inclán such as Divine Words (Divinas palabras) and Bohemian Lights (Luces de Bohemia) attack what he saw as the hypocrisy, moralising and sentimentality of the bourgeois playwrights, satirise the views of the ruling classes and target particular concepts such as masculine honour, militarism, patriotism and servile attitudes toward the Crown and the Roman Catholic Church.

His dramas also featured irreverent portrays of figures from Spain's political past and deployed crude, obscene language and vulgar imagery in a mocking attack on theatrical blandness.

In addition to being politically subversive, though, Valle-Inclán's plays often required staging and direction that went far beyond the abilities of many companies working in the commercial theatre, often featuring complex supernatural special effects and rapid, drastic changes of scene.

Rufino Blanco Fombona, for example, pokes fun of "the America of tambourine" ("la América de pandereta") of that novel where you could be in the jungle one day and the Andes the next.