Federico Garcia Lorca Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Family Background and Early Life
Federico Garcia Lorca was born on 5 June 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town in the province of Granada, into a household that joined rural prosperity with a respect for learning. His father, Federico Garcia Rodriguez, was a landowner, and his mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, a schoolteacher whose love of music and literature shaped the sensibility of her children. The family later moved between Granada and the nearby village then called Asquerosa (now Valderrubio), and kept a summer home, the Huerta de San Vicente, where quiet and landscape fed his imagination. Music came first: he learned piano, absorbed folk song, and discovered the deep, plaintive art of cante jondo. He studied at the University of Granada, nominally pursuing law and literature, while gravitating to salons, student theaters, and the circle of the composer Manuel de Falla, with whom he would help promote the celebrated 1922 festival that honored Andalusian song. His first book, Impresiones y paisajes (1918), a set of prose impressions from student travels, was privately supported by his family. His brother Francisco Garcia Lorca, later a critic and diplomat, would become an important chronicler of his life.

Madrid and the Residencia de Estudiantes
In 1919 he moved to Madrid and took residence at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a modernist crucible where artists and scientists mingled. There he befriended Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and Pepin Bello, relationships that threaded admiration with creative rivalry. He staged early plays and puppet shows, including El maleficio de la mariposa and the raucous Retablillo de Don Cristobal, exploring popular theater traditions. His friendships extended into the poets who would be called the Generation of 27: Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen, Gerardo Diego, Vicente Aleixandre, and later Luis Cernuda. An ode he dedicated to Dali captured both his belief in the clarity of form and the tensions that were growing as surrealism and cinema pulled his friends in different directions. He read widely, composed suites of poems and songs, and tested stagecraft with producers and actors who recognized his ear for speech and rhythm.

Poet of Andalusia and the Romancero Gitano
By the 1920s Lorca had matured into a distinctive voice. Libro de poemas (1921) established his lyrical temperament. Poema del cante jondo, written in the early 1920s and published later, rendered the austere music of Andalusia into stark imagery. Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928) made him famous across Spain: a suite of ballads where moonlight, knives, and guardias civiles converse with Roma legends and rural rituals. The book married popular forms to avant-garde compression, and its success complicated his life, pinning him to an image of regional lyricism even as he sought new experiments. His celebrated elegy Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935), written for the bullfighter and patron whose friendship had encompassed many artists, showed how grief, myth, and refrain could turn a death into a national chant.

New York, Cuba, and the Avant-Garde
In 1929, encouraged by the family friend and mentor Fernando de los Rios, Lorca sailed to New York and studied at Columbia University. The city's bridges, the shock of Wall Street's crash, and the vitality of Harlem expanded his palette. Poeta en Nueva York, composed there and on his subsequent trip to Cuba in 1930, fused outcry and dream into fractured, visionary diction. In Havana he found affinities with Afro-Cuban rhythms and met writers such as Nicolas Guillen and Alejo Carpentier. The poem Son de negros en Cuba bears that encounter in its very title. These journeys widened his sympathies and confirmed his feeling that the modern metropolis could be both infernal and generative.

Dramatist of Tragedy and Desire
Throughout the early 1930s, Lorca turned decisively to the theater. Mariana Pineda, long gestating and made vivid onstage by the actress Margarita Xirgu with designs linked to his friend Dali, presented a liberal martyr as emblem and warning. The trilogy of rural tragedies that followed established his dramatic stature: Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, 1933), Yerma (1934), and La casa de Bernarda Alba (written in 1936). These plays distilled themes of desire, honor, sterility, and repression into images and choruses that even non-theatrical audiences could recite. Doña Rosita la soltera traced social paralysis with a gentler irony. Experimental texts like El publico and Asi que pasen cinco anos tested radical forms and sexuality at a time when such candid explorations could not be staged. In lectures such as Juego y teoria del duende, he described the mysterious, dark force that animates truthful art. Key actors and directors championed him at home and abroad: Margarita Xirgu in Spain and later in exile, and in Buenos Aires the impresaria Lola Membrives, whose productions brought him immense success in Argentina and Uruguay.

La Barraca and the Second Republic
With the proclamation of the Spanish Second Republic, Lorca conceived a civic theater that could carry classics to towns far from the capitals. In 1932 he co-directed La Barraca with Eduardo Ugarte, a student troupe supported by the Ministry of Education. They toured the country with works by Calderon and Lope de Vega, erecting portable stages in squares and farmyards. The project blended pedagogy and festivity, and its rehearsals became laboratories for declamation, chorus, and design. This effort linked Lorca with teachers, students, and villagers who rarely met a living author, and it aligned his name with a democratic culture that would soon come under threat.

Private Life and Friendships
Lorca's private life, guarded by discretion and lyric indirection, shaped his work as deeply as any public event. Friends knew his attraction to men, a source of vulnerability in a conservative society. Relationships, including one with the sculptor Emilio Aladren and later with the young actor and technician Rafael Rodriguez Rapun, left traces in the Sonetos del amor oscuro and in the ache beneath his tragedies. He gravitated toward friendships with writers such as Vicente Aleixandre and Luis Cernuda who shared his modernist commitments, and maintained bonds with Dali and Bunuel despite periods of distance and misunderstanding. His brother Francisco and his sisters Concha and Isabel anchored him within a family that, for all its differences with modernist circles, sheltered his work.

Arrest and Death
The military uprising of July 1936 shattered the fragile balance of the Republic. Lorca, who was not a party militant but was widely identified with liberal ideas and with circles on the left, returned to Granada before the front advanced. Seeking safety, he took refuge in the home of the poet Luis Rosales, a friend from a conservative family. Within days he was arrested by Nationalist forces amid the terror that swept the city. In mid-August 1936 he was taken to the hills between Viznar and Alfacar and executed without trial. His grave has never been conclusively identified, despite later searches. The motives were tangled in the local hatreds of the moment: his fame, his known sympathies, his defense of the marginalized, and the symbolic power of his voice.

Posthumous Fate and Legacy
After his death, friends and colleagues scattered by war and exile kept his name alive. Rafael Alberti and Vicente Aleixandre honored his memory in verse; Margarita Xirgu staged his plays in Latin America and, in 1945, premiered La casa de Bernarda Alba in Buenos Aires, ensuring that his final completed drama reached audiences despite censorship in Spain. Poeta en Nueva York, Divan del Tamarit, and other manuscripts appeared posthumously, expanding the map of his late style. Generations of directors have revisited his tragedies to probe gender, power, and ritual, while scholars have studied his lectures on duende to understand the ethic of risk and authenticity that governed his art. Monuments in Granada and Fuente Vaqueros, the preservation of the Huerta de San Vicente, and biographies by close observers, including his brother Francisco, have deepened public knowledge without ever dispelling the aura of a life cut short. Federico Garcia Lorca stands as poet, playwright, and cultural organizer whose friendships, from Dali and Bunuel to Falla, Xirgu, and Membrives, trace a map of 20th-century Spanish culture at its brightest and most endangered.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Federico, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Art - Deep - Poetry - Legacy & Remembrance.

Other people realated to Federico: Pablo Neruda (Writer), Jose Bergamin (Writer), Philip Levine (Poet), Jose Bergaman (Writer), Antonio Machado (Poet)

• 1940 Poet in New York (Poetry Collection)
• 1936 The House of Bernarda Alba (Play)
• 1934 Yerma (Play)
• 1933 Blood Wedding (Play)
• 1928 Gypsy Ballads (Poetry Collection)

• Wikipedia