The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs is a collection of four autobiographical essays written by radical American author Josephine Herbst and published posthumously in 1991.
[1] In 1957 Herbst received a Newberry Library fellowship to work on her memoirs, and she had intended to publish them in a collection she tentatively titled The Burning Bush.
[4] The title essay was originally commissioned for the first issue of The Noble Savage literary magazine in 1960 and described her time in the Hotel Florida during the Spanish Civil War.
[4] It described her experience at the 1930 International Conference of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, and her subsequent investigation as a suspected communist sympathizer.
[3][4] Historian Arancha Usandizaga said that "The Starched Blue Sky" was "some of the most penetrating and honest written material on the [Spanish] Civil War".