Federico García Lorca's reputation rests equally on his poetry and his plays. He is widely regarded as Spain's most distinguished twentieth-century writer, his work has been translated into at least twenty-five languages, and his name is as familiar to the general reader as those of the novelists Miguel de Cervantes and Benito Pérez Galdós or the dramatists Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón. Lorca was a major participant in the flowering of Spanish literature that occurred over the years between World War I and the Spanish Civil War--an era whose wealth and diversity have been compared to those of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spanish Golden Age. He is normally categorized, therefore, as a leading member of the "Generation of 1927," a term as misleading as it is useful, but, nonetheless, Lorca's career coincided with those of certain other writers, mainly poets, who...