The Spanish author Pío Baroja y Nessi was born on December 28, 1872, and died on October 30, 1956. He was one of the most important writers of the Generation of '98. He came from a very well-known family. He had an artist brother named Ricardo and a famous scientist nephew named Julio Caro Baroja, who was the son of his younger sister Carmen. Tomás Pío was born in San Sebastian, Guipuzcoa. His father, Serafin Baroja, was also a famous writer and opera librettist. Baroja went to the University of Valencia to study medicine and got his PhD at the Complutense University in Madrid when he was 21 years old. Baroja was trained as a doctor, but he only worked as one for a short time in the Basque town of Cestona. The ideas for his book The Tree of Knowledge came from his thoughts of being a student. He also ran the family bakery for a short time and ran twice unsuccessfully as a Radical Republican for a seat in the Cortes Generales, the Spanish parliament. But Baroja's true calling was always writing, which he started doing seriously when he was 13.
