Jorge de Sena (1919-78) was a Portuguese poet, critic, essayist, novelist, dramatist, translator and university professor. His opposition to the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal led to him go into voluntary exile in Brazil in 1959 and, after the military coup in Brazil in 1964, he moved to the United States. He taught first at the University of Wisconsin and, for the last eight years of his life, at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature. After the bloodless coup in Portugal on 25 April 1974, he did return to Lisbon, but when no university there offered him a teaching post, he went back to California, feeling embittered and disillusioned, and died of cancer four years later.