Federico García Lorca was born in 1898 in southern Spain. From an early age he was fascinated by Spain's mixed heritage, adapting its folk songs, ballads, lullabies, and flamenco music into poems and plays. By the age of thirty, he had published five books of poems, culminating in 1928 with Gypsy Ballads, which brought him far-reaching fame. In 1929–30 he studied in New York City, where he wrote the poems that were published posthumously as Poet in New York. In 1936, at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, he was shot to death by anti-Republican rebels in Franco's army, and his books were banned and destroyed.
Christopher Maurer is the head of the Department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Illinois in Chicago.