Octavio Paz was an important Mexican poet, essayist, translator, diplomat, and one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. He was born in Mexico City on March 31, 1914. His father was a lawyer and an advisor to Emiliano Zapata. Because of his father's involvement in the Mexican Revolution, he was away for long periods, leaving Octavio to be raised largely by his mother and his paternal grandfather. His grandfather's extensive library introduced him to the classics of world literature and awakened his lifelong passion for poetry.
A gifted student, Paz began writing at an early age and published his first poetry collection in 1933. A few years later, he abandoned his law studies and traveled to the Yucatán Peninsula, where he worked on educational programs for impoverished rural communities. There he wrote *Between the Stone and the Flower* (1937), a long poem denouncing the exploitation of peasants by powerful landowners.
In 1937 he traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to participate in the International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture. Although he initially sympathized with left-wing ideals, he later rejected communism and became one of the earliest Latin American intellectuals to condemn the crimes of Stalinism.
In 1937 he married the Mexican writer Elena Garro, with whom he had a daughter. In 1943 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later he entered the Mexican Diplomatic Service.
His diplomatic career took him to New York, Paris, Tokyo, Geneva, and India, where he served as Mexico's ambassador from 1962 to 1968. His years in India profoundly influenced his thought and poetry, deepening his interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality.
In 1957 he published *Sunstone*, widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of modern Spanish-language poetry and among the finest love poems of Latin American literature. After divorcing Elena Garro, he married the French woman Marie-José Tramini in 1965, who remained his companion for the rest of his life.
In October 1968, Paz resigned from the Mexican Diplomatic Service in protest against the government's massacre of student demonstrators at Tlatelolco in Mexico City. Returning to Mexico, he founded the influential literary and cultural magazine *Plural*, and later *Vuelta*, which became one of the leading intellectual journals in the Spanish-speaking world. Between 1970 and 1974 he taught at Harvard University and lectured at many universities around the world.
Paz spent the later years of his life primarily in Mexico. He received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1981 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990 for a body of work distinguished by passionate intelligence, wide cultural horizons, and humanistic integrity. He died of cancer in Mexico City on April 19, 1998.
Throughout his career, Paz published more than a dozen collections of poetry along with numerous essays on literature, art, history, anthropology, politics, and cultural identity. His work established him not only as one of Mexico's greatest poets but also as one of the most original and profound thinkers of the modern era.
