Frederico Garcia Lorca: Life, Work and Criticism

A.T.J. Cairns was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

The short life and tragic death, at the hands of Franco’s executioners, of Frederico Garcia Lorca have continued to enhance the often extraordinarily high quality of his literary output, which included work of equal value in poetry and drama. Both the life and the work have an intense, concentrated quality; but as we leave his time and circumstances behind, his plays and verses, standing more and more on their own, are not diminished.

This brief volume provides, first, a short, concise, lucidly written and thoroughly accurate biography of the writer. This is followed by a Chronological List of Lorca’s Works, then by an essay by Professor MacCurdy on “Psyche and Symbol in the Works of Lorca.” Finally, there is an annotated bibliography which lists the biographical and critical works that provide about all we know or we can deduce about Lorca at this time.

The biographical essay does not evade the poet’s active Leftist political beliefs, or his homosexuality (he was for several years Salvador Dali’s lover), both of which hastened his execution. Unstable, impractical, at once surrealist and existentialist in outlook, early recognition and adulation brought him neither happiness on one hand nor a decline in the quality of his work on the other. This tastefully designed, if rather Spartan, publication, conscientiously researched and written, can only add to our fund of information about this indispensable figure in twentieth-century literature.