WRITERS – MORE THAN JUST LORCA

Many of Spain’s 20th-century authors have achieved international recognition, including five who won the Nobel Prize for Literature: dramatists Jose Echegaray (1904) and Jacinto Benavente (1922), poets Juan Ramon Jimenez (1956) and Vicente Aleixandre (1977), and novelist Camilo Jose Cela (1989). The most famous writer of the century, however, was poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca was born on June 5, 1898 at Fuente Vaqueros in Granada province and died August 18 or 19. 1936, between Viznar and Alfacar, Granada province. He was a Spanish poet and playwright who, in a career that spanned just 19 years, resurrected and revitalised the most basic strains of Spanish poetry and theatre.

Garcia Lorca’s poetry and plays drew heavily on the folklore of his native Andalusia, and especially on that of the Gypsies. The symbolism of his poetry is often elusive and difficult to interpret. Major themes of his plays are the suppression of instinct by social convention and the suppression of women. His works include the poetry collections Gypsy Ballads, Lament for a Bullfighter, Blood Wedding, Yema and The House of Bernarda Alba. In the early 1930s Lorca helped inaugurate a second Golden Age of the Spanish theatre. He was executed by a Nationalist firing squad in the first months of the Spanish Civil War and became a symbol of art perishing at the hands of fascism.

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, Spain and died on April 22, 1616 in Madrid. He was a Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in Spanish literature. His novel Don Quixote has been translated, in full or in part, into more than 60 languages. Editions continue regularly to be printed, and critical discussion of the work has continued unabated since the 18th century. At the same time, owing to their widespread representation in art, drama and film, the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are probably familiar to more people than any other imaginary characters in world literature.

Miguel de Cervantes was Spain’s greatest literary figure. Held captive by the Turks for five years, he was almost 60 when he wrote the comic masterpiece Don Quixote, La Mancha’s favourite son. Many iron figures in today’s La Mancha are testament to this popular figure and his creator. Statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are landmarks that abound in Spanish towns. Their portrait and pose are likely to stare from tiled murals on the walls of schools, museums and cultural centres. The familiar figures of the tall, lanky, and gaunt knight-errant with his rusty sword, crooked lance and broken helmet, perched on his emaciated old plough horse turned charger, towers over the stocky peasant Sancho Panza sitting astride his mule.

Gabriel Miro

Gabriel Miro was born on July 28, 1879, Alicante, Spain and died on died on May 27, 1930 in Madrid. He was a Spanish writer distinguished by the finely-wrought rich, imaginative vocabulary contained in his essays, stories, and novels. Miro studied law at the universities of Granada and Valencia. His many novels include Our Father Saint Daniel and The Leprous Bishop, both of which are critical of religious customs. Among his non-fiction works are Figures of the Passion of Our Lord and a series of books describing life in the Alicante region.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, USA and died on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho. An American novelist and short-story writer, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicised life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.

He worked at odd jobs in Chicago before sailing for France as a foreign correspondent of the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other writers in Paris –Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound –he began to see his non-journalistic work appear in print. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a novel with which he scored his first solid success.

The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the post war years. He remained based in Paris, but he travelled widely for skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life, and formed the background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short stories had been advanced by Men without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established him with stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. Among his finest stories are The Killers, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. To the public however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works.

Hemingway’s love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as sport. Soon after this, Spain was in the midst of a war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips there as a war correspondent.

The harvest of Hemingway’s considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel in preference to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama hills.

All of his life, Hemingway was fascinated by war. As World War II progressed, he made his way to London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day. Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the liberation of Paris and, although ostensibly a journalist, he impressed professional soldiers, not only as a man of courage in battle, but also as an expert in military matters, guerrilla activities, and intelligence collection.

In 1953 he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea, a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and pulls on board a giant marlin, only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home.