José Fernández Montesinos was a Spanish Hispanist, literary critic, and university professor. He was born in Granada in 1897 and died in Berkeley, California, in 1985. He studied in Spain and earned a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters. He was part of the generation of intellectuals of the Spanish Republic. After the Civil War, he went into exile in the United States, where he developed most of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in Spanish literature of the Golden Age, Romanticism, and the 20th century. He is known for his studies on figures such as Lope de Vega, Galdós, and Spanish exile literature.