Octavio Paz 1914 – 1998

Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat and one of the foremost Latin American writers of the twentieth century. His Labyrinth of Solitude, published in 1950, conducted a sustained meditation on Mexican identity and modernity that has shaped subsequent Latin American thought. Through long service in the Mexican diplomatic corps in France, India, and the United States, he engaged the surrealist, modernist, and South Asian traditions, integrating them in a wide-ranging body of essays on poetry, politics, and history. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.