León Felipe Camino Galicia (; 11 April 1884 – 18 September 1968) was an anti-fascist Spanish poet who also worked as a professor of literature in Spain and the US.
Biography
Felipe was born in Tábara, Zamora, Spain, while his parents were travelling. His father was a public notary and comfortably off. His family settled in Santander. In early adulthood Felipe would study Pharmacology and go into business as a pharmacist, ostensibly to please his father. However, literature exerted a stronger pull on him and he eloped with an itinerant theatre troupe. As a result, he was charged with fraud, due to the bankruptcy caused by dereliction of his business responsibilities, and spent two years in jail. On his release from custody, he started writing for literary reviews and later on his first books were published. He is one of Spain's best twentieth-century poets, and scholars have included him alongside Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Perdo Salinas, and Vicente Aleixandre among the members of Generation of 1927.
He fought in the Spanish Civil War for the Spanish Republican Army against the Nationalist faction. In 1938 he fled Spain and lived in exile in Mexico, where he died.