Octavio Paz

The Nobel Prize-winning Octavio Paz was born in 1914, near Mexico City. His family was forced into exile, which they served in the United States, after the assassination of Mexican president Zapata, in 1919. In 1943, Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship and he moved to the United States in order to study at the University of California, where he stayed for two years. In 1945, Paz became a Mexican diplomat and moved to Paris, where he would write his masterpiece The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a collection of nine essays regarding the Mexican identity. From 1970 to 1974, Paz lectured at Harvard University, where he was made an honorary doctor in 1980. In 1977, Paz was awarded the prestigious Jerusalem Prize for literature and in 1982 he was awarded the Neustadt Prize. It was in 1990 that Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for “impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.” Paz died of cancer in 1998.