Although he died less than a decade ago at the ripe age of ninety-three, Gerald Brenan is already fast slipping into literary oblivion. Even in the field to which he made his greatest contribution—Spanish studies—today’s graduate student would be hard pressed to identify the man, still less to have read his works. In some ways this is understandable: Brenan was not a university-trained academic but a man of letters of the most old-fashioned type. He picked the subjects he wanted to write about; worked as long on them as he pleased. Because he did not need to worry about making a living, he could afford to wait until the public discovered him. Once it did, from the mid-1940s on, no figure in the English-speaking world was regarded as a better (or more readable) authority on Spain—its literature first of all, but its broader culture and life as well. Meanwhile, however, times (and intellectual fashions) have greatly changed.

The publication of a major biography of the man by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, first in Great Britain and now a year later in the United States, is a serious effort to rectify matters, though one approaches this weighty tome wondering whether it is really quite needed. After all, Brenan himself was careful to provide us with an ample accounting of his life in two volumes of memoirs, A Life of One’s Own (1962) and A Personal Record (1974). Those who knew the man only from his charming accounts of Spanish life in