Imagine, if you will, a poet and playwright who died more than fifty years ago at the age of thirty-eight becoming the stuff of enduring legend—surviving decades of theatrical censorship in his own country and major aesthetic upheavals everywhere, including the death of poetry as a major art form. Imagine, too, that he wrote in a language that is not widely studied or read by the major literary intellectuals in Western Europe or the United States. And finally, picture such a figure commanding sufficient interest to justify a major biography by Ian Gibson, a world-class scholar, poet, and novelist, written over a ten-year period with the financial assistance of an improbable coalition of governments (Spain, Ireland, the United States, and Cuba), and published not by a university press but by Pantheon and Faber & Faber, two of the most prestigious commercial houses in the United States and Great Britain. That is the way—the only way—to give outsiders some sense of the abiding mystique of Federico García Lorca.¹

García Lorca: A Lifeis, inevitably, much more than the biography of a single individual. It is a detailed excursion through Spanish cultural life during the period between World War I and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, as seen from the vantage point of a literary-theatrical vanguard. The principal personalities of this group were Lorca, Luis Buñuel, Manuel de Falla, and Salvador Dalí, but it also included the Chileans Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro, the Cuban Alejo