Federico García Lorca has been called "the most important Spanish poet and dramatist of the twentieth century" by the Academy of American Poets. His short career had humble beginnings. Lorca was born near Granada, Spain in the village of Fuente Vaqueros, the son of a farmer and a homemaker. A talented student, he attended Sacred Heart University and the University of Granada, where he studied law, a subject that never captured his passion despite his aptitude for language.
After taking a field trip to Castile with his art class in 1917, Lorca was inspired to work on his first book of poetry, Impresiones y viajes, which he published in 1919. That year, he dropped out of university and moved to Madrid, where he focused entirely on writing poetry and drama. He also made a hobby of learning folk songs, an interest that impacted Blood Wedding, which uses folk music and rhymes as plot devices. He also befriended a group of artists and writers that would later be known as the "Generation of '27," whose members included Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and Pedro Salinas, among others.
Lorca lived in New York for a year starting in 1929, but quickly returned to Spain when the new Spanish Republic was declared. In the revolutionary, left-wing spirit of the times, Lorca and several contemporaries founded a touring theater company, which performed free shows in small towns and villages. As a prominent Republican artist, he was murdered by Fascist soldiers in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca's works were banned in Spain until the fall of Francisco Franco in 1975.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Federico García Lorca maintained a lifelong interest in the music and culture of rural Spain, a fascination that heavily influenced one of his most acclaimed tragedies, Blood Wedding. More directly, the play was inspired by a sensational crime...
The House of Bernarda Alba was written in 1936 during a flurry of creative activity for Lorca. He liked to say that his plays took years to form in his mind, and then a matter of weeks to write. Though this claim is not represented in the process...
Federico Garcia Lorca was born to a wealthy family in Spain in 1898. He grew up near Grenada where he received an excellent education and excelled as a piano player. After initially hoping to become a musician, Lorca began writing in 1916. Still,...
