The Labyrinth of Solitude

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was an award-winning Mexican poet and diplomat. Born into an elite Mexico City family, Paz’s life was intertwined with literature and politics from the beginning. Due to his father’s close association with the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, Paz’s family was briefly exiled into the United States while Paz was still a child. By the time Paz was a teenager, he was already a published poet and editor. He briefly studied law at the National University of Mexico, where he became involved with Leftist politics before ultimately joining republican partisans in their struggle against the Francoists during the Spanish Civil War.

Paz joined the Mexican diplomatic service and became a cultural attaché in Paris in 1946. He became closely acquainted with the leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton, as well as important Existentialist philosopher such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. In 1962, he became ambassador to India, but he resigned his position in the diplomatic service only a few years later to protest the Mexican Army’s massacre of student protestors in Tlatelolco. Over the next decade, Paz held professorships at Cambridge, Cornell, and Harvard. He enjoyed literary celebrity during his lifetime; among his many awards was the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his accomplishments as a poet and essayist.