O.V.Vijayan

OV Vijayan is undoubtedly the early exponent of modern fiction in Malayalam. Cartoonist, novelist and short-story writer, Vijayan has to his credit five novels besides several short stories, articles and a book on his own masterpiece, 'Itihasathinte Itihasam' (The Story of the Saga).

Starting his career as a lecturer, Vijayan soon opted for full-time journalism and left Kerala in 1958 to pursue his active interest in the world of cartoons in Delhi.

History of modern fiction in Kerala can be halved in to two, pre-Khasak and post-Khasak period. Such was the influence of his maiden effort ('Khasakinte Ithihasam'- Saga of Khasak, 1969), the imaginary land of Khasak and its characters Maimuna, Naizamali, Alla-picha-mollakka etc. penetrated the subconscious mind of Malyalee readers and formed the ethos of literary world. Though some characters and the land depicted in the novel were real, they served only as creative sparks to ignite the literary imagination of Vijayan.

The language of Vijayan is very vibrant and it encompasses the whole rhythm of earth. By recreating the movements and essence of every activity that's going on around him in nature, he brought in elements like Wind, Bloom, Tree, Sand, Expanse of space etc. in his literary efforts.

He often took the liberty of reinterpreting history to suit the needs of his story line. He pitted contemporary reality against the age-old insights propounded by Indian philosophy.

'Dharmapuranam' (Indian political situation), 'Khasakinte Ithihasam ' (Degeneration of ideologies), 'Madhuram Gayathi' (Attacks on Environment), 'Gurusagaram' (Materialist attitudes of the society) and 'Pravachakante Vazhi' (Prediction about the future of the land) stand testimony to this.

Apart from personal contributions to the world of novel, Vijayan has left impressionable imprints in short-story scenario. 'Kadaltheerathu', 'Kattuparanjakatha', 'Parakal' etc. were path breaking in its character and content. His political writings were noted for their visionary insights on the political developments of the contemporary circumstances and clarity of thought.

Apart from the interpretation of existing reality through his characters, his illustrations acted as powerful vehicles to portray thought-provoking ideas. He is one of the finest of cartoonists to emerge from Kerala.

He is the first Malyalee author to highlight the issue of environmental degradation through prose and the creative mind in him very much feared a nuclear holocaust, as is evident from his writings.

Often criticized for attacking the approach of socialists, he was labelled as being one who developed a soft corner for fundamentalism, which eventually resulted in developing an affinity towards religion and its cult leaders. This change is very much evident in 'Gurusagaram'.

His prophecy relating to the destiny of Keralite society through his writings are often visionary. The day-to-day crisis in politics, imposition of emergency, degeneration of the congress party, rise of fascism, degradation of environment etc. were all subject matter for his writings.

Gabriel Gárcia Márquez
, mGabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a town in Northern Colombia, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and the rumors of ghosts. But in order to get a better grasp on García Márquez's life, it helps to understand something first about both the history of Colombia and the unusual background of his family.

Colombia won its independence from Spain in 1810, technically making it one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but the sad fact is that this "democracy" has rarely known peace and justice.
In the beginning, there was of course Spain and the Indians, happily hating each other as the Spaniards tore the land up in quest for gold, El Dorado, religious converts, and political power. The English, too, played their part, with Drake attacking Riohachi in 1568 and the countless colonial squabbles of the next few centuries. Declaring itself independent from Spain when Napoleon ousted the Spanish King in 1810, the new country experienced a brief period of freedom and then was quickly reconquered in 1815 by the unpleasant and bloody campaigns of General Murillo. So much did their internal bickering allow their fledgling country to fall to the sword of Murillo, the period is immortalized in Colombia's history with the colorful name of la Patria Boba, or "The Booby Fatherland." Round two, however, fell to the Colombians, when Simón Bolívar reliberated the country in 1820 and became its very first president. In 1849, the country was sufficiently advanced enough to concretize their squabbling in the form of two political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, who exist to this day. These two parties form the political framework for much of García Márquez's fiction, and understanding their true natures is both a key to his writing and, unfortunately, an important insight to Latin American politics in general.
Although initially forming around the nucleus of two distinct and different ideologies, long years of bloody conflict have served to significantly erode the distinctions between the parties. The Conservatives and the Liberals are more like warring factions or clans than any parties with firmly established and radically different ideologies. Both tend to be repressive, both are corrupt, and both terribly abuse power when it falls into their hands; and throughout the sad history of Colombia, both parties have been more or less at war. It has often been said of Colombia's parties that you do not join them, you are born into them; and indeed they act more as territorial and familial units than as peacefully functioning parties with distinct political platforms. In addition, the country is split into two main regional groups -- the costeños of the coastal Caribbean, and the cachacos of the central highland. Both groups use those terms as pejorative of the other, and both view the other with disdain. The costeños tend to be more racially mixed, verbally outgoing, and superstitious. They are primarily the "descendants of pirates and smugglers, with a mixture of black slaves," and as a whole are "dancers, adventurers, people full of gaiety." The cachacos, on the other hand, are more formal, aristocratic, and racially pure, who pride themselves on their advanced cities such as Bogotá and on their ability to speak excellent Spanish. Traditionally, the tropical Caribbean coast has been a Liberal bastion, and the cool mountains and valleys of the interior tend to the Conservative side. García Márquez has often remarked that he views himself as a mestizo and a costeño, both characteristics enabling his formation and development as a writer.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Colombia was wracked by rebellions, civil wars of both the local and national variety, and several coups d'etat.This century of bloodshed had its culmination in 1899, when the War of a Thousand Days began -- Colombia's most devastating civil war, a conflict that ended in late 1902 with the defeat of the Liberals. The war claimed the lives of over 100,000 people, primarily peasants and their sons. García Márquez's grandfather fought in that war, and many of its veterans would eventually find their way into immortalization as fictional characters in his work.
Another event that would influence his work was the prevalence banana industry and the massacre of 1928. Although coffee is generally considered Colombia's main export, for the first few decades of the twentieth century, bananas were also of crucial importance to the economy. The banana trade had its principle manifestation in the United Fruit Company, an American outfit that had a virtual monopoly on the banana industry, which at the time was the only source of income for many of the costeño areas, including Aracataca. The UFC had unlimited economic power and tremendous political clout, but it was a corrupt and amoral company that abused its Colombian workers terribly. In October of 1928, over 32,000 native workers went on strike, demanding, among other such unreasonable things, toilets and payment in cash rather than company scrip. One night a huge crowd of them gathered to hold a demonstration. In order to quell the incident, the Conservative government sent in the troops, which fired on the unarmed workers, killing hundreds. Over the next few months, more people simply vanished, and finally the whole incident was official denied and struck from the history books. García Márquez would later incorporate the incident in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The next significant event that would eventually affect his writing was a period of time that he himself would live through, a horrible period of time called la violencia, or "the Violence." The Violence has its roots in the banana massacre. At that time, one of the only politicians courageous enough to take a stand against government corruption was a man named Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a young Liberal member of congress who convened meetings to investigate the incident. Gaitán began to rise in prominence, a champion of the peasants and the poor, but an annoyance to the powerful members of both parties, who viewed him with something akin to fear and loathing. Using radio as his medium, he heralded a time of change, a time when the people would take part in a true democracy and corporations would be forced to act responsibly. By 1946, Gaitán was powerful enough to cause a split in his own party, who had been in power since 1930. The split caused a Conservative return to power, and fearing a reprisal, they began organizing paramilitary groups whose ultimate purpose was to terrorize Liberal voters; which they did admirably, killing thousands of them by the end of the year. In 1947 the Liberals gained control of the Congress, putting Gaitán in charge as party leader. (Despite the Conservative's efforts, the voter turnout was at a record high.) Tensions rose, and on April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated in Bogotá.
The city was convulsed by lethal riots for three days, a period called el Bogotázo and responsible for 2500 deaths. La violencia entered a more deadly phase. Guerrilla armies were organized by both parties, and terror swept through the land. Towns and villages were burned, thousands -- including women and children -- were brutally murdered, farms were confiscated, and over a million peasants emigrated to Venezuela. In 1949, Conservatives even gunned down a Liberal politician, in the middle of giving a speech in the very halls of Congress! The Conservatives finally dissolved Congress, declared the country to be in a state of siege, and Liberals (now conveniently branded "communists") were hunted, persecuted, and murdered. The country was ripped apart; la violenciawould claim the lives of some 150,000 Colombians by 1953. The Violence would later become the backdrop to several of García Márquez's novellas and storiesost notably In Evil Hour.

Jean Genet

French novelist, playwright and poet Jean Genet was born in Paris on December 19, 1910. Abandoned by his parents, he spent much of his youth in an institution for juvenile delinquents. At the age of ten, he was accused of stealing. Although innocent of the charge, having been described as a thief, the young boy resolved to be a thief. "Thus," wrote Genet, "I decisively repudiated a world that had repudiated me."

Between 1930 and 1940, he wandered through various European countries, living as a thief and male prostitute. Eventually, he found himself in Hitler's Germany where he felt strangely out of place. "I had a feeling of being in a camp of organized bandits. This is a nation of thieves, I felt. If I steal here, I accomplish no special act that could help me to realize myself. I merely obey the habitual order of things. I do not destroy it." So Genet hastened on to a country that still obeyed a more conventional moral code.

In 1943, after being imprisoned for theft, Genet began writing. Ignoring traditional plot and psychology, Genet's plays rely heavily on ritual, transformation, illusion and interchangeable identities. His experiences in prison would inform much of his work. The homosexuals, prostitutes, thiefs and outcasts of his plays are trapped in self-destructive circles. They express the despair and loneliness of a man caught in a maze of mirrors, trapped by an endless progression of images that are, in reality, merely his own distorted reflection.

Genet's first dramatic effort is a poignant examination of the oppressed and the oppressor. In Deathwatch he experiments with a murderer in the role of hero. The play revolves around three inmates who struggle for domination of a prison cell while an unseen fourth prisoner watches on.

In his next play; The Maids, Genet portrays a ritualistic act of two maids who take turns acting as "Madame," abusing each other as either servant or employer. The ceremony reveals not only the maids' hatred of the Madame's authority, but also their hatred of themselves for participating in the hierarchy that oppresses them.

First staged at a private club in London because it was considered too scandalous for Paris audiences, The Balcony is set in a brothel of "nobel dimensions," a palace of illusions in which men can indulge their secret fantasies, perhaps as a judge inflicting punishment on a beautiful thief, or as a dying Foreign Legionaire being succoured by a beautiful Arab maiden. But outside the brothel, the country is caught up in the throes of revolution, and these false roles become confused with the real roles of "bishop," "judge" and "general" until nothing is certain.

In The Blacks, a troupe of colored actors enacts before a jury of white-masked blacks the ritualistic murder of a white of which they have been accused. The last of Genet's plays to be produced during his lifetime, The Screens, is his comment on the Algerian revolution. Like all of Genet's works, these plays are grotesque, sometimes bewildering, savage, and haunting. Simultaneously cultivating and denouncing the stage illusion, they exude a strange ritualistic, incantatory quality that successfully transforms life into a series of ceremonies and rituals that bring stability to an otherwise unbearable existence.

In addition to his plays, Genet wrote several novels and film scripts. "Our Lady of Flowers" is a Popular novel of Genet."Thief's Journal" is an autobiographical kind of Novel. He also produced a silent picture, Un Chant D'Amour (1949). Genet died in Paris on April 15, 1986.

Ernest Hemmingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was the owner of a prosperous real estate business. His father, Dr. Hemingway, imparted to Ernest the importance of appearances, especially in public. Dr. Hemingway invented surgical forceps for which he would not accept money. He believed that one should not profit from something important for the good of mankind. Ernest's father, a man of high ideals, was very strict and censored the books he allowed his children to read. He forbad Ernest's sister from studying ballet for it was coeducational, and dancing together led to "hell and damnation".

Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest's mother, considered herself pure and proper. She was a dreamer who was upset at anything which disturbed her perception of the world as beautiful. She hated dirty diapers, upset stomachs, and cleaning house; they were not fit for a lady. She taught her children to always act with decorum. She adored the singing of the birds and the smell of flowers. Her children were expected to behave properly and to please her, always. Mrs. Hemingway treated Ernest, when he was a small boy, as if he were a female baby doll and she dressed him accordingly.

This arrangement was alright until Ernest got to the age when he wanted to be a "gun-toting Pawnee Bill". He began, at that time, to pull away from his mother, and never forgave her for his humiliation. The town of Oak Park, where Ernest grew up, was very old fashioned and quite religious. The townspeople forbad the word "virgin" from appearing in school books, and the word "breast" was questioned, though it appeared in the Bible. Ernest loved to fish, canoe and explore the woods. When he couldn't get outside, he escaped to his room and read books. He loved to tell stories to his classmates, often insisting that a friend listen to one of his stories. In spite of his mother's desire, he played on the football team at Oak Park High School.

As a student, Ernest was a perfectionist about his grammar and studied English with a fervor. He contributed articles to the weekly school newspaper. It seems that the principal did not approve of Ernest's writings and he complained, often, about the content of Ernest's articles. Ernest was clear about his writing; he wanted people to "see and feel" and he wanted to enjoy himself while writing. Ernest loved having fun. If nothing was happening, mischievous Ernest made something happen. He would sometimes use forbidden words just to create a ruckus. Ernest, though wild and crazy, was a warm, caring individual. He loved the sea, mountains and the stars and hated anyone who he saw as a phony. During World War I, Ernest, rejected from service because of a bad left eye, was an ambulance driver, in Italy, for the Red Cross. Very much like the hero of A Farewell to Arms, Ernest is shot in his knee and recuperates in a hospital, tended by a caring nurse named Agnes. Like Frederick Henry, in the book, he fell in love with the nurse and was given a medal for his heroism. Ernest returned home after the war, rejected by the nurse with whom he fell in love. He would party late into the night and invite, to his house, people his parents disapproved of. Ernest's mother rejected him and he felt that he had to move from home.

He moved in with a friend living in Chicago and he wrote articles for The Toronto Star. In Chicago he met and then married Hadley Richardson. She believed that he should spend all his time in writing, and bought him a typewriter for his birthday. They decided that the best place for a writer to live was Paris, where he could devote himself to his writing. He said, at the time, that the most difficult thing to write about was being a man. They could not live on income from his stories and so Ernest, again, wrote for The Toronto Star. Ernest took Hadley to Italy to show her where he had been during the war. He was devastated, everything had changed, everything was destroyed. Hadley became pregnant and was sick all the time. She and Ernest decided to move to Canada. He had, by then written three stories and ten poems. Hadley gave birth to a boy who they named John Hadley Nicano Hemingway.

Even though he had his family Ernest was unhappy and decided to return to Paris. It was in Paris that Ernest got word that a publisher wanted to print his book, In Our Time, but with some changes. The publisher felt that the sex was to blatant, but Ernest refused to change one word. Around 1925, Ernest started writing a novel about a young man in World War I, but had to stop after a few pages, and proceeded to write another novel, instead. This novel was based on his experiences while living in Pamplona, Spain. He planned on calling this book Fiesta, but changed the name to The Sun Also Rises, a saying from the Bible. This book, as in his other books, shows Hemingway obsessed with death. In 1927, Ernest found himself unhappy with his wife and son. They decided to divorce and he married Pauline, a woman he had been involved with while he was married to Hadley. A year later, Ernest was able to complete his war novel which he called A Farewell to Arms.

The novel was about the pain of war, of finding love in this time of pain. It portrayed the battles, the retreats, the fears, the gore and the terrible waste of war. This novel was well-received by his publisher, Max Perkins,but Ernest had to substitute dashes for the "dirty" language. Ernest used his life when he wrote; using everything he did and everything that ever happened to him. He nevertheless remained a private person; wanting his stories to be read but wanting to be left alone. He once said, "Don't look at me. Look at my words." A common theme throughout Hemingway's stories is that no matter how hard we fight to live, we end up defeated, but we are here and we must go on. At age 31 he wrote Death in the Afternoon, about bullfighting in his beloved Spain. Ernest was a restless man; he traveled all over the United States, Europe, Cuba and Africa.

At the age of 37 Ernest met the woman who would be his third wife; Martha Gellhorn, a writer like himself. He went to Spain, he said, to become an "antiwar correspondent", and found that war was like a club where everyone was playing the same game, and he was never lonely. Martha went to Spain as a war correspondent and they lived together. He knew that he was hurting Pauline, but like his need to travel and have new experiences, he could not stop himself from getting involved with women. In 1940 he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and dedicated it to Martha, whom he married at the end of that year. He found himself traveling between Havana, Cuba and Ketchum, Idaho, which he did for the rest of his life. During World War II, Ernest became a secret agent for the United States. He suggested that he use his boat, the "Pillar", to surprise German submarines and attack them with hidden machine guns. It was at this time that Ernest, always a drinker, started drinking most of his days away. He would host wild, fancy parties and did not write at all during the next three years.

At war's end, Ernest went to England and met an American foreign correspondent named Mary Welsh. He divorced Martha and married Mary in Havana, in 1946. Ernest was a man of extremes; living either in luxury or happy to do without material things. Ernest, always haunted by memories of his mother, would not go to her funeral when she died in 1951. He admitted that he hated his mother's guts. Ernest wrote The Old Man and the Sea in only two months. He was on top of the world, the book was printed by Life Magazine and thousands of copies were sold in the United States. This novel and A Farewell to Arms were both made into movies. In 1953 he went on a safari with Mary, and he was in heaven hunting big game. Though Ernest had a serious accident, and later became ill, he could never admit that he had any weaknesses; nothing would stop him, certainly not pain. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Toward the end, Ernest started to travel again, but almost the way that someone does who knows that he will soon die. He suddenly started becoming paranoid and to forget things. He became obsessed with sin; his upbringing was showing, but still was inconsistent in his behavior. He never got over feeling like a bad person, as his father, mother and grandfather had taught him. In the last year of his life, he lived inside of his dreams, similar to his mother, who he hated with all his heart. He was suicidal and had electric shock treatments for his depression and strange behavior. On a Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun.

Ernest Hemingway takes much of the storyline of his novel, A Farewell to Arms, from his personal experiences. The main character of the book, Frederick Henry, often referred to as Tenete, experiences many of the same situations which Hemingway, himself, lived. Some of these similarities are exact while some are less similar, and some events have a completely different outcome. Hemingway, like Henry, enjoyed drinking large amounts of alcohol. Both of them were involved in World War I, in a medical capacity, but neither of them were regular army personnel. Like Hemingway, Henry was shot in his right knee, during a battle. Both men were Americans, but a difference worth noting was that Hemingway was a driver for the American Red Cross, while Henry was a medic for the Italian Army.

In real life, Hemingway met his love, Agnes, a nurse, in the hospital after being shot; Henry met his love, Catherine Barkley, also a nurse, before he was shot and hospitalized. In both cases, the relationships with these women were strengthened while the men were hospitalized. Another difference is that Hemingway's romance was short-lived, while, the book seemed to indicate that, Henry's romance, though they never married, was strong and would have lasted. In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine and her child died while she was giving birth, this was not the case with Agnes who left Henry for an Italian Army officer. It seems to me that the differences between the two men were only surface differences. They allowed Hemingway to call the novel a work of fiction. Had he written an autobiography the book would probably not have been well-received because Hemingway was not, at that time, a well known author. Although Hemingway denied critics' views that A Farewell to Arms was symbolic, had he not made any changes they would not have been as impressed with the war atmosphere and with the naivete of a young man who experiences war for the first time.

Hemingway, because he was so private, probably did not want to expose his life to everyone, and so the slight changes would prove that it was not himself and his own experiences which he was writing about. I believe that Hemingway had Catherine and her child die, not to look different from his own life, but because he had a sick and morbid personality. There is great power in being an author, you can make things happen which do not necessarily occur in real life. It is obvious that Hemingway felt, as a young child and throughout his life, powerless, and so he created lives by writing stories. Hemingway acted out his feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness by hunting, drinking, spending lots of money and having many girlfriends. I think that Hemingway was obsessed with death and not too sane. His obsession shows itself in the morbid death of Miss Barkley and her child. Hemingway was probably very confused about religion and sin and somehow felt or feared that people would or should be punished for enjoying life's pleasures. Probably, the strongest reason for writing about Catherine Barkley's death and the death of her child was Hemingway's belief that death comes to everyone; it was inevitable. Death ends life before you have a chance to learn and live. He writes, in A Farewell to Arms, "They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. ... they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you."

Hemingway, even in high school, wrote stories which showed that people should expect the unexpected. His stories offended and angered the principal of his school. I think that Hemingway liked shocking and annoying people; he was certainly rebellious. If he would have written an ending where Miss Barkley and her child had lived, it would have been too easy and common; Hemingway was certainly not like everyone else, and he seemed to be proud of that fact. Even the fact that Hemingway wrote curses and had a lot of sex in his books shows that he liked to shock people. When his publisher asked that he change some words and make his books more acceptable to people, Hemingway refused, then was forced to compromise. I think that the major difference between Hemingway and Henry was that Henry was a likable and normal person while Hemingway was strange and very difficult. Hemingway liked doing things his way and either people had to accept him the way he was or too bad for them. I think that Hemingway probably did not even like himself and that was one reason that he couldn't really like other people. Hemingway seemed to use people only for his own pleasure, and maybe he wanted to think that he was like Henry who was a nicer person.

In the book, Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Malcolm Cowley focuses on the symbolism of rain. He sees rain, a frequent occurrence in the book, as symbolizing disaster. He points out that, at the beginning of A Farewell to Arms, Henry talks about how "things went very badly" and how this is connected to "At the start of the winter came permanent rain". Later on in the book we see Miss Barkley afraid of rain. She says, "Sometimes I see me dead in it", referring to the rain. It is raining the entire time Miss Barkley is in childbirth and when both she and her baby die. Wyndham Lewis, in the same book of critical essays, points out that Hemingway is obsessed with war, the setting for much of A Farewell to Arms. He feels that the author sees war as an alternative to baseball, a sport of kings. He says that the war years "were a democratic, a levelling, school". For Hemingway, raised in a strict home environment, war is a release; an opportunity to show that he is a real man.

The essayist, Edgar Johnson says that for the loner "it is society as a whole that is rejected, social responsibility, social concern" abandoned. Lieutenant Henry, like Hemingway, leads a private life as an isolated individual. He socializes with the officers, talks with the priest and visits the officer's brothel, but those relationships are superficial. This avoidance of real relationships and involvement do not show an insensitive person, but rather someone who is protecting himself from getting involved and hurt. It is clear that in all of Hemingway's books and from his own life that he sees the world as his enemy. Johnson says, "He will solve the problem of dealing with the world by taking refuge in individualism and isolated personal relationships and sensations". John Killinger says that it was inevitable that Catherine and her baby would die.

The theme, that a person is trapped in relationships, is shown in all Hemingway's stories. In A Farewell to Arms Catherine asks Henry if he feels trapped, now that she is pregnant. He admits that he does, "maybe a little". This idea, points out Killinger, is ingrained in Hemingway's thinking and that he was not too happy about fatherhood. In Cross Country Snow, Nick regrets that he has to give up skiing in the Alps with a male friend to return to his wife who is having a baby. In Hemingway's story Hills Like White Elephants the man wants his sweetheart to have an abortion so that they can continue as they once lived. In To Have and Have Not, Richard Gordon took his wife to "that dirty aborting horror". Catherine's death, in A Farewell to Arms, saves the author's hero from the hell of a complicated life.

Octovio Paz

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.