‘On the ball like nobody else’: my teachers of Spanish literature at California and Harvard

In this paper the author describes the period of her life in which she studied Spanish literature. A descendant of Jewish immigrants who settled in the United States at the beginning of the last century, Krow-Lucal was raised in a multilingual environment where she learnt Spanish and subsequently took courses in Spanish literature, at the University of California and Harvard University. During this time she studied under the renowned Hispanic specialists Joseph H. Silverman, Raimundo Lida and Stephen Gilman, and was introduced by Gilman to Jorge Guillén (Gilman’s father-in-law), with whom she established a lasting intellectual and personal relationship. At the end of her studies Krow-Lucal became a specialist in the works of Pérez Galdós but the combined influence of all these figures has had a major effect on her intellectual, literary and academic life and continues to guide her writing and teaching activities in the US.