Pablo Neruda Biography

Poet, diplomat, bohemian and political activist, Pablo Neruda was a household name throughout Latin America for much of the 20th century. In his 20s he was already famous for his Spanish-language poems of melancholy, love and eroticism, published in best-selling collections such as Crepusculario (1923) and a 1924 title translated as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. His writing continued in waves from 1927 to 1943 as he worked as a Chilean consular official in Burma, Ceylon, Java, Argentina, Spain, France and Mexico. His poetry turned political as he witnessed poverty in Chile and civil strife in Spain. In the latter country, his friend Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated and Neruda helped 2,000 Republican refugees relocate to Chile. He was elected to Chile’s Senate and joined the Communist Party in 1945, was forced into hiding in 1948, fled to Argentina in 1949, and in 1950 published Canto General, a sweeping work of poems devoted to the beauty and struggles of Latin America. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and died of cancer days after the 1973 overthrow of another friend, socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende, by Augusto Pinochet.