Federico García Lorca

García Lorca’s father was a successful farmer married to a teacher. Together they raised four children, of which Federico García Lorca was the eldest. When the author was ten years old, the family moved to Granada, where García Lorca enrolled in a Catholic school as well as a secular institute run by the Roman Catholic Church. Later, García Lorca attended the University of Granada, where it took him nine years to earn a degree on account of his unimpressive schoolwork. An impassioned pianist, he traded music for writing when he was a young man, eventually befriending several artists, including filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí. In 1919 he wrote his first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, which was composed in verse. Unfortunately, it was largely made fun of by critics and thus only ran for four shows. In the 1920s García Lorca became associated with Spain’s avant-garde scene, publishing both poetry and plays, including Gypsy Ballads, his most popular poetry collection, which came out in 1928 and is largely about life in Andalusia—a theme he explored throughout his career. After a brief stint in New York City in 1929, the author returned to Spain during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorial rule, at which point he began touring as an actor and director of a theater troupe that brought plays to rural communities throughout the country. It was during this period that he penned three plays now known as the “rural trilogy,” which includes Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. As he presented these plays, he became known for his socialist beliefs. Because of the Spanish government’s fascist government at the time, though, he was arrested in 1936 on the same day that his brother-in-law was assassinated after having accepted the position of mayor in Grenada. It is said that García Lorca himself was assassinated for political reasons the following day, though some people uphold that there were other factors that contributed to his execution.