Paz enjoyed a distinguished career as a diplomat, playwright, essayist, and poet, and is regarded as one of the greatest writers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, the first Mexican to be so honored, in recognition of a body of work that includes more than thirty volumes of poetry and over forty prose works on subjects ranging from Mexican culture to literary theory and Eastern philosophy.

Paz was born Octavio Paz Lozano in Mexico City in the middle of the Mexican Revolution in 1914. He was raised in the small town of Mixcoac by his mother, his aunt, and his paternal grandfather, a prominent liberal intellectual and novelist. Paz came into early contact with literature in his grandfather's extensive library. His father was a journalist and lawyer who had joined the uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata, the peasant...