Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) is Spain’s most celebrated twentieth-century author. He achieved success and popularity as both poet and dramatist within Spain before his untimely death, and his international reputation has grown steadily since then, resulting in an extraordinary range of editions, translations, critical commentary, productions, and adaptations.

Lorca is most often categorized as belonging to the “Generation of 1927,” a group of ten or so writers – predominantly poets – who rose to prominence in Spain in the later 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. The group originated in a number of friendships, some of which went back to childhood, and while its members admired each other’s work, that work was, stylistically, very diverse.

Lorca’s family and friends expected him to pursue a career in music rather than literature, but a cultural excursion in which he participated in 1916 seems to have been the catalyst that re-oriented him toward letters. Organized by one of his professors at the University of Granada, it involved regular writing assignments, and prose, surprisingly enough, was the first genre that the young Lorca essayed. Soon, however, he was also experimenting with both poetry and drama.