Through New York newspapers, with their myriad articles on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s life, good deeds, novels, films based upon his novels, controversies, and rebellion against the Spanish monarchy, plus the disputes that his rebelliousness as well as his writings ignite, along with his death, Blasco establishes contact with, maintains, and/or deepens his relationship with an already admiring New York reading public after he arrives for his US lecture tour in late October 1919.

The celebrity that New York newspapers discover in Blasco early on in the twentieth century and then help develop and project (whether intentionally or unintentionally) is that of a great novelist who holds an astounding amount of knowledge in a wide swath of fields, an exceptionally open soul who is an unappointed cultural emissary of Spain in the US, a hero who defies the monarchy in his homeland, and a humanitarian who dies while attempting to realize a noble project that would improve the lives of others.

The overall trajectory of the newspapers’ reception and critical treatment of Blasco's translated novels paints a fascinating portrait of his rise to fame, his lengthy period of cultural influence / presence, and his eventual decline in this field. However, his celebrity continues to grow during the 1921-1926 Hollywood film era, which overlaps with a very public return to politics in 1924, and finally to the lengthy, serial-novel like series of events surrounding his 1928 death, burial, and eventual return to Valencia in 1933.