Biography of Federico Garcia Lorca

Biography of Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico García Lorca was born into an educated bourgeois family in Fuente Vaqueros, in Andalusia, Spain, in 1898. His mother was a teacher and his father a rich farm labourer. He read literature and music at Granada University and in 1919, at the age of 21, he published his first book, Impresiones y Paisaijes, that was inspired by a trip around Spain that he took as part of his degree. That year, Lorca went to Madrid to continue with his studies. He moved into the Residence of Scholars (residencia de estudiantes), a liberal institution that taught according to the social, political and religious philosophies of Krause. Their view of religion gave way to what is called pantheism, which is a perspective Lorca embraced in his work. The importance of the residencia in shaping a generation of writers and poets that became known as the Generation of ’27 cannot be underestimated. All the latest innovations in the arts were discussed and debated within the walls of this institution and its students included names as

was a had a profound affect on Lorca’s generation, where he would meet and make good friends with the famous Spanish poets, Juan Ramón Jiménez (born in Huelva in 1881-1958), Emilio Prados (born in Málaga in 1899-1962), Rafael Alberti (1902-present) and Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), as well as the famous Surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí (born in 1904 in Figueras), to whom he would write an ode in 1926, and Luis Buñuel (born in 1900 in Teruel), among others. Through his friends at the Residencia he soon got to know a number of other poets with whom he also shared a bond in terms of friendship and ideological leanings and who have since been given many names including that of “La Generación del ´27” (The Generation of ´27). This group, or generation includes his friends Prados, Alberti and Guillén, as well as Pedro Salinas, Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda and Manuel Altolaguirre. Of these, Lorca’s poetry has most often been compared with that of Rafael Alberti.

Lorca was a prodigious artist, poet and playwright; his first play, El Maleficio de la Mariposa (The Butterfly's Evil Spell), premiered in 1920 and his first book of poems, Libro de Poemas (Book of Poems), was published the following year, although neither of these initially received the acclaim that his later works would. In November 1921 he wrote Poema del Cante Jondo, which would not be published until a decade later, in 1931.