by Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was born in the Andalusian town of Fuente Vaqueros, but spent much of his youth in the nearby city of Granada. Many years later he would be executed by a firing squad in Granada during the early weeks of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca studied law at the University of Granada, but in 1919 he moved to Madrid to pursue his passion for art and literature. Lorca published both drama and poetry in the early 1920s. It was not, however, until he released his collection of poems Gypsy Ballads (1928), in which he linked Spanish folklore to the new, surreal imagery of his day, that Lorca earned national recognition. His theater during the 1920s alternated between comedy and avant-garde experimentation in works such as The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife (1926) and Once Five Years Pass (written in 1929 and 1930). In the...