Life and Literature

Abstract

Throughout his adult life, García Lorca spoke frequently and with great pleasure about the profound importance he attributed to his early childhood in the small villages in the countryside near Granada, and later, in the provincial capital city itself. Lorca’s father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a wealthy landowner with several substantial holdings in the rich alluvial plain called La Vega de Granada. Having been widowed in his first marriage and left without children, Don Federico’s second marriage (of which his family disapproved because of the inferior social and economic background of his bride) was to a school teacher from Granada, Vicenta Lorca Romero. She was an intelligent and cultured young woman, well educated and a lover of music, who had left the capital city to teach school in Fuente Vaqueros, one of the villages in the Vega. The mere fact that she had a profession and a job is an indication of her independence and strength of character. The influence of her personality was to be of the utmost importance for Federico, her oldest son, born in June of 1898.