Antonio Buero Vallejo was born September 29, 1916, in Guadalajara, Spain, just east of Madrid. Buero Vallejo's father, a military engineer, owned a sizable collection of plays and drama journals. These inspired the young Buero Vallejo to stage his own plays in which he mimicked imaginary battles dressed, for example, as D'Artagnan of Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers (1844), sang old ballads, and read and recited dialogue. Buero Vallejo and his friends progressed into constructing elaborate sets of complete towns with wooden boxes as houses and "actors" made of cardboard. Shifting the props, they acted out legends of the wild west, stories of outer space travel, or fairy tales. But young Buero Vallejo wanted to be a painter, partially from an intense interest in the great Spanish painter, Diego Velazquez (1599-1660). At eighteen, Buero Vallejo enrolled in Madrid's San Fernando School of Fine Arts. When the Spanish Civil War erupted...