Of humble origins, his father died when he was four months old. His mother, with four young children to support, worked as a laundress, washing clothes in the River Manzanares, while the family lived in a garret in the poor Lavapiés district of Madrid. Barea was semi-adopted by his aunt and uncle who were prosperous enough to send him to school. This resulted in his first experience of the class divisions that riddled Spanish society, when his own sister accused him of "acting the gentleman" while she worked as a servant. He left school aged 13 and got a job at a bank as an office boy and copyist, though did not become a fully-paid employee for another year. He later quit after being fined for breaking a glass-plate desk cover.

He did his military service in Ceuta and Morocco, rising to the rank of Sergeant, fighting in the Rif War. He began writing and published some poems. He then worked in an office registering patents (he had originally wanted to be an engineer), and in 1924, he married. He was a member of the Socialist UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores) and helped found the Clerical Workers Union at the start of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931.

On the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in mid-1936 he organized a volunteer militia unit La Pluma (The Pen) of office workers fighting under the UGT. Later, thanks to his knowledge of English and French, he worked as a censor at the Foreign Ministry's Press Office where he came to know Ernest Hemingway and many other foreign journalists covering the conflict. During the siege of Madrid he joined the Radio Service broadcasting to Latin America, where he became known as An Unknown Voice of Madrid, every night telling stories about daily life in the besieged city. He also met the Austrian journalist Ilse Kulcsar. They were married in 1938.

As defeat for the Spanish Government loomed, this, allied to difficulties with the Communist party (he was not a member and therefore suspect), and a breakdown in his health, meant that he and his wife had to leave Spain. They went to exile to France in the middle of 1938, and then to England in 1939. From then until his death, Barea worked for the BBC's World Service Spanish section, while contributing articles and reviews to various literary publications, as well as writing books.He is buried, with his wife, in Faringdon, Oxfordshire.

The Forging of a Rebel

His best-known work is his autobiography La Forja de un Rebelde (The Forging of a Rebel), published in three volumes:

• The Forge (La Forja) tells the story of his childhood and adolescence growing up in Madrid between 1905 and 1914. ( It was reviewed favourably by George Orwell in Horizon, " a fragment of autobiography, and we may hope that others will follow it..if the Fascist powers have done no other good, they have at least enriched the English-speaking world by exiling all their best writers. ")
• The Track (La Ruta) recounts his military experiences in Morocco during the "War of the Rif" from 1920 to 1925.
• The Clash (La Llama) narrates his experience of the Civil War and exile between 1935 and 1940 - " The book starts off in a Castilian village and ends up in Paris, but its essential subject is the siege of Madrid."

The books were translated into English by Ilsa Barea and first published between 1941 and 1946. The first Spanish language edition was published in Argentina in 1951. It was not published in Spain until 1978. La Forja de un Rebelde was dramatised on TVE in 1990, directed and with screenplay by Mario Camus.

Short stories

• Valor y Miedo (Courage and Fear), Spain, 1938.
• El centro de la Pista, 1960.

Biographies

• Lorca, the Poet and his People, 1944.
• Unamuno, 1952.

Novels

• La Raiz Rota (The Broken Root), 1955. Published in Spanish in 2009 by Editorial Salto de Página, Madrid.