Rafael Lapesa Melgar was born in Valencia on February 8, 1908. Spanish philologist, academic and Spanish language teacher.

In 1916 he moved to Madrid with his family. At the University of Madrid, she studied Philosophy and Literature and became a Doctor of Letters.
In 1930, he got the Chair of Spanish Language and Literature, which he held in several secondary schools in Madrid, Oviedo and Salamanca, while teaching courses in the universities of these cities.
In 1947 he passed the Chair of Historical Grammar of the Spanish Language of the University of Madrid, which he held until his retirement in 1978.

Until 1981 he served as deputy director and director of the Lexicography Seminar of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), being director of this in 1987. He was named honorary president of the International Association of Hispanists from 1947-1977, holding the position of vice president between 1965 and 1971. As a visiting professor, Lapesa teaches at various American universities such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley among others.

He is an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; member of the Hispanic Society of America; corresponding member of the Royal Galician Academy, of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres of Barcelona, ​​of the Argentine Academy of Letters, of the National Academy of Letters of Uruguay, of the Paraguayan Academy of Language, of the Academy of Arts and Letters of Puerto Rico, of the Institute of Asturian Studies, of the Alfonso el Magnánimo Institution of Valencia and of the Valencian Culture Center.

He published more than three hundred articles in the fields of linguistics, the history of literature and literary criticism. As a historian of literature, his field of research was the poetry of the Renaissance, the Golden Age and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.