Spanish poet and playwright from Andalusia — the most beloved Spanish writer of the 20th century and one of its most murdered. Lorca wrote lyric poetry steeped in Andalusian folk song, cante jondo, and the Romany culture of the Spanish south (Gypsy Ballads, Romancero gitano, 1928, which made him famous overnight), spent 1929–30 in New York and Cuba (producing the furious, surrealist Poet in New York, published posthumously in 1940), and in the 1930s turned increasingly to the theater, producing the rural tragedy trilogy — Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934), The House of Bernarda Alba (1936, unperformed in his lifetime) — that is the foundation of modern Spanish drama.
His work is bound to two deep sources: the folk and Gypsy traditions of Andalusia (which he, Manuel de Falla, and others sought to recover and honor without folklorizing), and the duende — Lorca's name, borrowed from flamenco, for the dark, earthy, death-facing power he held to be the mark of authentic art, distinct from both angel (grace) and muse (inspiration). His lecture Play and Theory of the Duende (1933) is the great Spanish aesthetic statement of the century.
He was gay, which the work sometimes makes obvious and sometimes almost obvious; the posthumously published Sonnets of Dark Love (1984) do not equivocate. In August 1936, a month into the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested in Granada by Francoist forces and shot without trial; his body has never been found. He is thus both a poet and a political fact, and in Spain the two remain inseparable.