Ricardo Flores Magón (September 16, 1874–November 21, 1922) was born on Mexican Independence Day, in San Antonio Eloxochitlan , Oaxaca, Mexico. He died at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas, USA.

Magón explored the writings and ideas of many anarchists; he examined the works of early anarchists Michael Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon but was also influenced by his anarchist contemporaries: Elisee Reclus, Charles Malato , Errico Malatesta, Anselmo Lorenzo, Emma Goldman, Fernando Tarrida del Marmol and Max Stirner. However, he was most influenced by Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Magón also read from the works of Karl Marx and Henrik Ibsen. He was the leading inspirer of the Mexican Revolution, the Mexican revolutionary movement in the Partido Liberal Mexicano . Magón edited Regeneración, which aroused the workers against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, which he considered as a kind of anarchist bible, served as basis for the short-lived revolutionary communes in Baja California during the "Magonista" Revolt of 1911. Magón remained from 1904 in the USA, half of this period in prison, driven from city to city.

His movement fired the imagination of the American anarchists. His last arrest was in 1918, receiving a twenty year sentence for "obstructing the war effort". He died in prison but his remains rest in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City.