He volunteered as the proofreader for the novel Noli Me Tángere in which the Filipino patriot José Rizal expressed his contempt for the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.

Tired and disgusted with government failures and inaction, he moved to Paris at the beginning of the First World War.

His next books consist of detailed studies of aspects of rural life in the farmlands of Valencia, the so-called huerta that the Moorish colonizers had created to grow crops such as rice, vegetables and oranges, with a carefully planned irrigation system in an otherwise arid landscape.

The concern with depicting the details of this lifestyle qualifies what he called an example of costumbrismo: The works also show the influence of naturalism, which he would most likely have assimilated through reading Émile Zola.

There is also a strong political element as he shows how destructive it is for the poor farmworkers to be fighting one another rather than uniting against their true oppressors – the church and the landowners.

However, along the preaching are lyrical and highly detailed accounts of how the irrigation canals are managed and of the workings of the age-old "tribunal de las aguas", a court composed of farmers that meets weekly near Valencia Cathedral to decide which farm gets to receive water and when and arbitrates on disputes on access to water.

He left behind costumbrismo and Naturalism and began to set his novels in more cosmopolitan locations than the huerta of Valencia.

Prominently, Sangre y arena [es] (Blood and Sand, 1908), which follows the career of Juan Gallardo from his poor beginnings as a child in Seville to his rise to celebrity as a matador in Madrid, where he falls under the spell of the seductive Doña Sol, which leads to his downfall.

His greatest personal success probably came from the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916), which tells a tangled tale of the French and German sons-in-law of an Argentinian landowner who find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the First World War.