Federico Garcia Lorca was born into an educated family of small
landowners in Fuente Vaqueros in 1898. A poet, dramatist, musician
and artist, he attended the university at Granada, where he
acquired a fine knowledge of literature. In 1919 he went to the
Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid and during his long stay there
he met all the principal writers, critics and scholars who visited
the place, which was then a flourishing centre of cultural
liberalism. In 1928 his Gipsy-Ballad Book (Romancero gitano)
received much public acclaim. In 1929 he went to New York with
Fernando de los Rios and his volume of poems Poet in New York
(Poeta en Nueva York) was published posthumously in 1940.
On his return to republican Spain, he devoted himself to the
theatre, as co-director of La Barraca, a government-sponsored
student theatrical company that toured the country. He now wrote
fewer poems, but these include his masterpiece Lament for Ignacio
Sanchez Mejias (Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sanchez Mejias,
1935), a lament for a dead bullfighter. He wrote classical plays,
pantomimic interludes, puppet plays, La zapatera prodigiosa (1930)
and three tragedies- Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre, 1933), Yerma
(1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (La casa de Bernarda Alba,
1936). Just after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 he
was murdered at Granada by Nationalist partisans, in mysterious
circumstances.
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