Octavio+Paz

Paulina Octavio Paz was born on March 31, 1914 in a little village in Mexico called Mixcoac, to Octavio Paz Solórzano and Josefina Lozano. Paz was raised by his mother Josefina, his aunt Amalia Paz, and his paternal grandfather Ireneo Paz, a liberal intellectual, novelist, and publisher. Because of Paz's family's public support of Emiliano Zapata, after Zapata's assassination they were forced into exile, which they served in the United States.

Paz was introduced to literature at an early age through the influence of his grandfather's library, which was filled with classic Mexican and European literatur e. In the 1920s,he was influenced by Spanish poets Juan Ramon Jimenez, Gerardo Diego, and Antonio Machado after he discovered them. In 1931, under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, Paz published his first poems, inlcuding "//Cabellera//." Two years later he published //Luna Silvestre ("Wild Moon")//, a collection of poems. In 1932 he founded his first of his many literary review with some friends, //Barandal//. In 1935, Paz abandoned his law studies and went to Yucatan to work at a school in Merida. There he began "Entre la piedra y la flor" (Between the Stone and the Flower") influenced by T. S. Eliot. It describes the situation of the Mexican peasants under the rule of the greedy landlords of that time. In 1937, Paz was invited to the "Second International Writer Congress in Defense of Culture" in Spain during Spain's civil war. Showing his solidarity against fascism and with the Republicans. In 1938, when he returned to Mexico, Paz was the co-founder of a literary journal, Taller ("Workshop"). By 1939 Paz considered himself a poet. He wrote for the magazine until 1941. He also met and married Elena Garro. She is now considered one of Mexico's finest writers. Together they had one daughter, Helena, and divorced in 1959. In 1943 Paz received a fellowship and began studying at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States. Two years later he entered the Mexican diplomatic service, working in New York for some time. In 1945, he was sent to Paris. There he wrote //El Laberinto de la Soledad ("The Labyrinth of Solitude"),// an amazing study of Mexican identity and though. In 1952 he travelled to India for the first time and to Tokyo as chargé d'affaires, and then to Geneva, in Switzerland. In 1962 he was named Mexico's ambassador to India. During his stay in India, he published many works. Two of which were //El mono gramático// (//The Monkey Grammarian//) and //Ladera este// (//Eastern Slope//).While in India he came into contact with a group of writers called the Hungry Generation and had a profound influence on them. In 1958 Paz had an affair with Italian painter Bona Tibertelli de Pisis, with whom he broke up with in 1963. He then married his lifelong wife Marie-José Tramini, a French woman. In October 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic corps in protest of the Mexican government's massacre of student demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. He sought refuge in Paris for a while and returned to Mexico in 1969, where he founded his magazine //Plural// (1970–1976) with a group of liberal Mexican and Latin American writers. He went on to teach at Harvard. In 1975 the Mexican government closed //Plural//.In 1977 he won the Jerusalem Prize for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In 1980 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard.And in 1982 he won the Neustadt Prize. After that, Paz founded //Vuelta//, a publication with a focus similar to that of //Plural//, and he continued to edit that magazine until he died of cancer in 1998.

A collection of his works written between 1957-1987 was published in 1990. The same year that he was awarded the Nobel A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. And in 1998 Guillermo Sheridan, who was name by Paz as director of the Octavio Paz Foundation in 1998, published a book with several biographical essays about the poet's life up to 1968 called //Poeta con paisaje (2004)//