Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (13 June 1888 – 30 November 1935) was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential literary figures and one of the language's best poets. He also wrote in English and translated from French.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, not only under his own name, but he created approximately seventy-five others, three of which stand out: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He named them heteronyms rather than pseudonyms because he felt this captured their genuine autonomous intellectual life better. These fictitious characters occasionally held unpopular or radical beliefs.

Pessoa regarded himself as a British-style conservative, that is to say, liberal within conservatism and utterly anti-reactionary, and he stuck tightly to his upbringing's Spencerian individualism. His form of nationalism was defined as a mystic, cosmopolitan, liberal, and anti-Catholic. He was an outspoken elitist who opposed communism, socialism, fascism, and Catholicism. He initially supported the First Portuguese Republic, but the resulting instability led him to reluctantly support the military coups of 1917 and 1926 as a method of restoring order and preparing for the transition to a new constitutional normalcy.

He wrote a pamphlet in favor of the military dictatorship in 1928, but following the foundation of the New State in 1933, Pessoa became disillusioned with the regime and spoke harshly of Salazar and fascism in general, remaining antagonistic to its corporatist policy, illiberalism, and censorship. Pessoa was banned by the Salazar administration in early 1935 after writing in favor of Freemasonry. The administration also censored two pieces Pessoa published in which he opposed Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia and fascism as a menace to human rights everywhere.