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.

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City, the grandson of the liberal novelist and journalist Ireneo Paz and the son of an agrarian lawyer who served as Emiliano Zapata's representative in the United States. He published his first poems at sixteen, studied briefly at the National Autonomous University, and in 1937 traveled to Spain to attend the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in besieged Valencia. He entered the Mexican diplomatic service in 1944 and served, after a long stint in Paris, as ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968.

His writings range across poetry, criticism, and political and cultural philosophy. The book-length essay The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and its sequel Postscript (1970) examine the formation of Mexican identity; The Bow and the Lyre (1956) is a poetics; Conjunctions and Disjunctions (1969) and The Other Voice (1990) extend his cultural and political reflections; the long poem Sun Stone (1957) and the late Tree Within (1987) are among his major poetic works. He founded the journals Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta (1976-1998).

Paz resigned his ambassadorship in protest at the Tlatelolco massacre of October 1968 and from then on combined his literary career with a public role as the principal liberal critic of authoritarian politics in the Spanish-speaking world. He received the Cervantes Prize in 1981 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990 and died in Mexico City in April 1998.