BOOKS | Lorca

Farrar Straus Giroux; Bloomsbury [British ed.]

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Winner of 1999 Midland Society of Authors Award for Biography

Lorca

A Dream of Life

This detailed portrait of the greatest of Spain’s 20th-century poets, Federico García Lorca, sheds new light on a man whose birth coincided with his country’s defeat in the Spanish-American War and whose death, at the hands of Nationalist partisans in August 1936, with the start of the Spanish Civil War. Leslie Stainton uses previously unknown letters and archival material, as well as exclusive interviews with friends, family, and acquaintances, to illuminate Lorca’s life, work, and sexuality.

“[A] meticulously annotated book, stuffed with astonishing pictures … but most importantly a sensitive appraisal of a dramatist who, firmly rooted in the past, turned the modern theater upside down.”  

—Time Out

“It is to Leslie Stainton’s credit that she does not belabor the pathos in García Lorca’s life in her full-scale, measured and enjoyable biography.” 

—New York Times

“Sensible and sensitive, this is a book of voices, the central one being that of Lorca himself. Biography has become a messy, dishonourable pursuit. This maligned genre, however, has been somewhat redeemed by Leslie Stainton’s valuable, insightful book about a mercurial genius who died knowing his best work would be left undone.”

—The Irish Times

“The Lorca who emerges is still, like Wilde, the salon man par excellence, but more human—a fantastist and dissembler, and an egotist so romantic that his ambition often overreached his talent.”  

—The Independent