Federico García Lorca is Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poet and dramatist. He was born on June 5, 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a village on the banks of the River Genil, a few miles from Granada. His father, Federico García Rodriguez, was a prosperous and liberal farmer. His mother, Vicenta Lorca Romero, had been a schoolteacher before becoming Federico's second wife. Lorca died near Granada, on August 19, 1936, one of the first and most famous casualties of the Spanish Civil War, He was shot without trial by Falangist soldiers in the opening days of the war, and quickly became a symbol of all the victims of political oppression and fascist tyranny.

As a child, he studied music, an activity which enhanced his natural sense of rhythm, and in his late teens, he began to write poems which he would recite in local cafés. As a young man, García Lorca read philosophy and law at the University of Granada, but he soon abandoned his legal studies for literature, art, and the theatre. In 1918, he published a book of prose inspired by a trip he had taken to Castile, and in 1919, he transferred to the University of Madrid where he organized theatrical performances and continued to read his poems in public. During this period he entered the Residence de Estudiantes, a modern college and the intellectual center of the town and became associated with a group of artists who would later become known as Generación del 27, including the painter Salvadore Dalí, the filmmaker Luis Bunuel, the poet Rafael Alberti, and the writers Juan Ramon Jimenez and Pablo Neruda. He worked with Dali and Bunuel in several different productions. Years later, when the two made their notorious short film Un Chien Andalou (1928), García Lorca was offended: he thought that the film was about him.

At the same time he studied music, collaborating in the 1920s with Manuel de Falla, and becoming an expert pianist and guitar player, but the turning point in his literary career was the folk music festival Fiesta de Cante Jondo in 1922, where he found inspiration for his work from the traditions of folk and gypsy music.

Lorca’s early reputation as a poet rested on the Romancero gitano (The Gypsy poems of Garcia Lorca)  which made him the poet of Andalusia and its gypsy subculture, in which he drew upon his boyhood contacts with the gypsies of the town of his birth, Fuente Vaqueros, to concoct a bewitching blend of social commentary and dreamlike fantasy. The best known poems from this period are the "Ballad of the Sleepwalker" (famous for the haunting refrain, "Green, green, how I love you green") which tells the tale of a gypsy smuggler who is killed by the police before he can rejoin his mistress, and the "Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard", in which he recounts, in a mesmerising display of metaphor, a police raid on a gypsy community, with the burning of houses and the murder of the inhabitants. Another Lorca classic is the ode to his dead friend Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, “Lament For The Death Of A Bullfighter”, perhaps the most enduringly successful surrealist poem ever written in any language. All these poems are profoundly Andalusian, richly sombre in their mood and imagery, and disquieting in their projection of a part-primitive, part-private world of myth moved by dark and not precisely identifiable forces; but, beneath the flamenco trappings, there is a deeper - perhaps personal - anguish, as well as a superb rhythmical and linguistic sense.

The public soon labeled Lorca as the "Gypsy poet", which displeased him, and perhaps partly to dispel this myth, he moved to New York in 1929 to study English at Columbia University where he came into contact with amateur theatre groups and professional repertory companies. The trip also inspired a book of poetry, Poet in New York, which was published posthumously. Critical interest has since shifted to the tortured, ambiguous and deliberately dissonant surrealist poems of Poeta en Nueva York , and to the arabesque casidas and gacelas of Divein de Tamarit.

Lorca returned to Spain in 1931 and formed his own theatre company. Composed mostly of students, "La Barraca" toured the countryside  in a truck staging farces and tragedies in village squares in the backwaters of Andalucia, giving free performances of the Spanish classics, including the works of Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca , and Miguel de Cervantes. The company also produced the three "rural tragedies" on which Lorca's theatrical reputation rests. His fostering of popular theatre gave him a left-wing reputation which contributed to his death (although his homosexuality also made him a target).

His reputation as a playwright rests, however, mainly on the three 'folk tragedies', Bodas de sangre  (Blood Wedding), Yerma  and La casa de Bernarda Alba  (The House of Bernarda Alba:), whose settings recall the Romancero gitano, as do the unspecified dark forces (associated with earth, blood, sex, water, fertility/infertility, death, and the moon) which appear to manipulate the characters in Bodas de sangre and Yerma. Both these plays are richly poetic, with an almost ritualized primitivism (Lorca was highly superstitious, and his dark forces were not mere dramatic ploys).
The first of these tragedies, Blood Wedding (1933), was based on a newspaper account of a bride who ran off with her lover on her wedding night. In this play, Lorca heightens the woman's conflict by placing her in the middle of an ancient blood feud. Intended to be part of a "trilogy of the Spanish earth", Blood Wedding restored tragic poetry to the Spanish stage. Yerma (1934), also part of the Spanish earth trilogy, is the story of a woman who longs for motherhood, but who's husband is incapable of giving her a child. Unable to leave him because of the social customs of the day, and unwilling to satisfy her urges with another man, the unhappy woman murders her sterile husband. Although dramatically sound, Yerma was not as well received as Blood Wedding, primarily because it was criticized by conservatives as an attack on traditional Spanish values.
Lorca's third tragedy, The House of Bernarda Alba, is often mistakenly referred to as the third part of the "Spanish earth" trilogy, but in truth, the trilogy was never finished. Bernarda Alba is starker: deliberately prosaic, more readily interpretable as social criticism (i.e. of the pressures of convention, the imprisoning effect of mourning customs, the frustration of female sexuality by the need to wait for an acceptable match), but it is so dominated by the title character - who tyrannizes her five daughters - that it emerges as the study of a unique individual rather than a typical woman. Each tragedy has one outstanding female role, those of Yerma and Bernarda having been written for the great tragic actress Margarita Xirgu.

Unfortunately, Lorca was to be an early casualty of the Spanish Civil War. Intellectuals were considered dangerous by General Franco's Nationalists, and when Franco launched his overthrow of the Republican Government, in 1936, Andalucia was the first region to fall. As each town and village was taken, a witch-hunt of the leading leftists took place followed by mass executions, in the name of the nationalist's "crusade" to rid Spain of the followers of Karl Marx. While not a political man himself, Lorca was inextricably associated with the libertarian movement, and his sister was married to Granada's Republican mayor, putting him high on the Fascist hit list. It is also possible that his thinly disguised homosexuality may have added to the antagonism of the conservative set; in any case, Lorca was one of the 30,000 inhabitants of Granada to pay with their lives for having supported Spain's fledgling democracy and attempt to break the stranglehold of the Church and bourgeoisie over the dirt-poor peasantry of Andalucia.

In the early morning of August 19, 1936, along with a schoolmaster and two bullfighters, Lorca was dragged into a field at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, shot, and thrown into an unmarked grave. He had only finished the first draft of The House of Bernarda Alba two months earlier and had recently told a Spanish journalist: "I still consider myself a true novice, and I'm still learning my profession ... One has to ascend one step at a time ... [One shouldn't] demand of my nature, my spiritual and intellectual development, something that no author can give until much later ... My work has just begun."
 
Lorca's writings were outlawed and burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen. Even his name was forbidden. The young poet quickly became a martyr, an international symbol of the politically oppressed, but his plays were not revived until the 1940's, and certain bans on his work remained in place until as late as 1971. Today, Lorca is considered the greatest Spanish poet and dramatist of the 20th Century.