Requiem por un campesino espanol, a short, elegant and moving account of the tragic effects of the Spanish Civil War on a small Aragonese population, is often called Ramon J. Sender's greatest masterpiece. It was the author's own favorite book and -in his own words- of all his novels it is "the simplest, and the most universal." This characteristic of "universality" flows through all Sender's writings, while he manages to still be the most Spanish of the generation that began to write just before the onset of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. As a journalist who allied himself with the...

As he wrote La casa de Bernarda Alba, Federico Garcia Lorca explained: "drama is poetry that escapes the book and becomes human. And as it is being made it talks and shouts, cries and despairs." Lorca saw in theatre the most perfect means to reach people's souls, more immediate and effective than poetry, and he kindled this possibility even amidst difficult times. Lorca is, mainly, a poet, and as so his plays possess great visual as well as linguistic virtue. The last of the rural tragedies -Bernarda Alba was preceded by Bodas de sangre (1933) and Yerma (1934)- was finished in June 1936. It...